Home from Cabo

I'm home from Cabo. Yes, this picture is exactly what it looked like.

Here is the schedule for my days:
1. Sleep ten hours.
2. Wake up and slip out to the little loveseat on the balcony and gaze at the Sea of Cortez for a while.
3. Breakfast in the suite with fellow writers Annie and Nancy: mango juice, Assam tea, toast with butter and marmelade, or vanilla yogurt with granola and half a banana.
4. Go to my "office." This was the best part of the entire wonderful day. I would take my clipboard, pad, and pen, and go outside and settle myself at a comfy couch in a shaded pavilion looking out over the pool and the sea, and write for two, three, or four hours, usually from 9 until 1, with occasional little breaks for daydreaming. (Annie and Nancy, working on their laptops, stayed in the room to have proximity to an electrical outlet - lucky me, to write longhand!).
5. Lunch back at the suite with Annie and Nancy: sandwiches and fruit.
6. Read a little bit, do a little bit of email, write a little bit more.
7. 3:00 - swimsuits on! Nancy would swim in the ocean (brave girl), while Annie and I lolled about by the pool. Then Nancy would collect us and we'd all walk around in the pool for an hour or so, and then go sit in the hot tub for a bit.
8. Freshen up in the room.
9. Dinner at one of the two stunningly beautiful and ultra-posh restaurants at the Hilton resort right next door.
10. Home by 8:30 at the latest to put on our nightgowns and pj's, and read aloud to each other and share/critique.
Then: nice early bedtime.

That's what we did for seven solid days. Two days we did make dinner in our suite, and one day we took a shuttle into the town of Cabo San Lucas to look around a bit and have dinner at Mi Casa. But all we really wanted to do was write, read, talk, and look at the ocean. And that's basically all we did. I wrote 80 pages. I read four books: Moon over Manifest (this year's Newbery Award winner), Room (mesmerizing), Incendiary (amazing voice), and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (perhaps the most exquisite collection of sentences I have ever read).

Now it's real regular life for a while. I returned from 80-degree temperatures and sunny skies to 40-degree temperatures and rain. I returned to heaps of email, unpaid bills, plus those 80 pages to type up. But all I have to do is close my eyes and I'm in my "office" again, scribbling away, with occasional glances out at the sunlight glinting on the sea.