Bouchercon Auction III, Vacation and McCain's Homes

Well we’re home from a great, relaxing vacation. We traveled through eight states and stayed here and there. Now I find out that John McCain has seven houses. We were probably close to one of them and could have stayed overnight and saved a hotel bill. Oh well.

Vacation was a real blast. Cindy and I traveled to the center of the USA. We flew into Kansas City on Thursday morning and traveled through Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, drove along the edge of Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and then rolled across Missouri back to KC. We put 2100 miles on a Toyota RAV4, which is a nifty mini-SUV, and never tired of the driving. We saw a wide variety of sites, met a lot of nice people, and we ate real well. With one exception (breakfast at Denny’s), we ate no fast food. Can you say “steaks and barbecue”? Well, more about vacation later.

We may have taken vacation from work, but we didn’t take vacation from the Bouchercon Auction. We kept in touch with folks who wanted to donate to the auctions and it paid off.

We’ve received plenty of generous offerings from the mystery community that I think are going to make this a very exciting auction. For instance: how about a signed first edition of Lee Child’s first Jack Reacher novel: KILLING FLOOR? How about a drink or a critique (your choice) with the inimitable guest of honor, Baltimore’s own, Ms. Laura Lippman? I can sense your excitement from here. Okay, one more sample. Our gracious live auction co-host, Chris Grabenstein, has offered a Ceepak Six-Pak – a signed copy of all four Ceepak books, a box of taffy, and well, I’m going to keep the sixth item a surprise, but it just might be relevant to the scene of the crime in Ceepak #4: HELL HOLE. Pretty cool, right?

We've cooked up a couple more ideas to make your auction experience more pleasurable, but I'll hold those until next time.