Archive for 'travel'



December 30th, 2011
by Crystal Jordan
Happy Hawaiian Holidays, all!

This is going to be a seriously short post. Why? Because I just got off a plane from Hawaii and I’m headed out of town again for a birthday road trip. Fun, right? It was my first ever trip to Hawaii and I had the most amazing time ever. We went swimming in the ocean (in December and it was warm!), visited Pearl Harbor and the Dole pineapple plantation, and then drove around the entire island (Oahu, not the big island). We had Christmas dinner at a restaurant with an incredible oceanfront view, and then a sunset sail on a catamaran the last evening we were there.

And that’s the update from me. Now I have to run around like a crazy lady to pack and get on the road for my next trip. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, or as they said to us in Hawaii “Mele Kalikimaka and Hau’oli Makahiki Hou”!

-Crystal Jordan

December 17th, 2009
by Susan Lyons
Spicing Up The Season

Lyons Sex Drive animated adIt’s been a while since we’ve had a sexy post here at the Aphro site. I figure, it’s the season to be jolly, and what’s more jolly than . . . sex in interesting places!

When I started my Wild Ride to Love series, the concept was that three sisters would travel home by planes, trains, and automobiles to their baby sister’s wedding – and along the way, each would have a sexy romance. Fun idea, isn’t it? A physical journey, and the sexy journey of falling in love.

So, I started writing the first book, Sex Drive, which is out this month. Repressed professor Theresa Fallon, the eldest sister, lives in Sidney, Australia, so of course she has to travel home by planes to Vancouver, BC. One flight from Sydney to Honolulu, then another from Honolulu to Vancouver. And of course I had to give her an ultra-sexy seatmate, in Damien Black, thriller writer and one of Australia’s 10 sexiest bachelors!

Well, there they were, eating and drinking and flirting, on that first very long flight and . . . well, it’s an Aphrodisia book so we know the in-flight entertainment is going to get down and dirty, right? On a plane. Have you ever done it on a plane? There’s not all that much room, or privacy, is there? And yet, somehow Theresa and Damien manage. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

Still, I couldn’t imagine restricting their sex scenes to the confines of an airplane (I have an imagination, but it’s not that creative!), so I gave Damien a stop in Honolulu for a reading/signing at a bookstore, and he persuades Theresa to overnight there with him. And that opened up other interesting possibilities. Yes, the hotel room has a bed, but Waikiki Beach by moonlight just begs for a little skinny-dipping, don’t you think? What’s better foreplay than skinny-dipping?

[Want to view a book video of Sex Drive?]

I’ve written outdoor “maybe we’ll get caught” sex before, particularly in Champagne Rules. I’ve written firehall and firefighter training center sex in Hot in Here. Sex on the front deck of a sailboat; that’s in “Too Hot to Handle” in Men on Fire. Hmm, what are some of the other ways that inventive lovers can find to hook up?

Time for you to get into the act. What have you done, read, written, seen, imagined? What’s the most inventive place you can think of to have sex? Let’s share some spicy stuff and heat up this holiday season!

July 4th, 2008
by KateDouglas
This great, big, fantastic, amazing country…and making new friends

It’s Independence Day, the perfect time to think about this amazing country we Americans call home. I’m still digging out after taking a most amazing trip around a lot of it last month–my husband and I loaded up the dog and way too much stuff in our little motorhome and took off for Lori Foster and Dianne Castell’s fantastic conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. I’d scheduled stops at book stores along the way in order to meet a few of my readers, and we also visited a small museum in Central City, Nebraska, where some artifacts out of my husband’s family’s past are on display, which was a really cool part of our trip. The map at the top has the entire 6300 mile route drawn out–we were gone exactly three weeks and I still haven’t assimilated everything we saw. This country is huge, it’s beautiful, and it’s got everything.

We headed out with plans to see as much of the West and Midwest as we possibly could, and believe me, we saw a LOT! We also dodged a few thunderstorms, missed most of the floods and tried to sleep through more than one night of tornado warnings. (Those nights were generally in hotels, not the RV. We figured it wouldn’t offer much protection, and I didn’t want to end up like Dorothy headed to Oz in a whirl of wind and dust!)

The best part of the trip–beyond the trip itself–was meeting readers, both at my stops along the way as well as the conference. Once again I’m reminded just how terrific my readers are. Every single person I met on this trip was someone I’d love to just hang out with if life weren’t so hectic or they didn’t live a thousand miles away! I’m still on a high from all the neat things we saw and the people we met–I think one of the things that surprised me the most was the common ground we seemed to find the minute we got together. I’d go into the bookstore, we’d meet up and find a table in the coffee shop and IMMEDIATELY start gabbing like we’d known each other for years. It’s got to be the fact we’re all readers of romance. Is it like that for you? You meet someone at a book signing or a conference, or maybe just standing beside them in a book store perusing the titles, and suddenly you’re chatting away like old friends. Is it just romance readers? What is it that gives us that instant connection? I’d love to know what you think.

And, if you’re at all interested in some of the pictures of people and stuff, I’ve got quite a few photos up on our trip “diary” at www.katedouglas.com/june2008