Cynthia Lord's Blog, page 75

My First Glimpse of Toronto

Through the airplane window.  I had the best day yesterday with my friend, Amy McAuley, and her daughter. I loved every minute of it! 

(Photos to come later: including black squirrels and a mink!)

The Burlington Book Festival

I ended my trip to Vermont by speaking at the Burlington Book Festival on Sunday.  I did a presentation on my picture books and then I spoke on two panels: one of middle grade authors and another panel with all the children's and young adult authors. 

I always love to come to Burlington. It's a beautiful, vibrant city on the shores of Lake Champlain and across the lake, you can see the mountains of New York. 

  

There are lots of interesting shops and restaurants.  The night before the festival, a group of us had supper together.

   clockwise from the left: Elizabeth Bluemle, Sarah Albee, Kara LaReau, Peter Laird, Jeannine Atkins, Erica Perl, and me.

It was a great start to the festival!  Something else that made me smile about Burlington were the gargoyles.

  

At first, I thought the gargoyle on the right had a golf club. Hoooowl! Not the sand trap.  But no, it's a light. :-)

I met some wonderful teachers and librarians and families.  And I loved my adorable Hot Rod Hamster fans.  One little boy brought me his very well-worn Scholastic Book Club copy to sign. "It's his favorite book," his dad told me. 

And  I love how when I read that story, the littlest listeners just call things out with such enthusiasm.  I had one little 2-year-old who couldn't even SIT because he was so excited! So his dad knelt behind him and held onto him.  As an author, you get so much back from an audience.

The whole day was lovely.  I even got to loan David Macaulay my laptop to show his slides. So yesterday morning, I touched the Page Down and Arrow keys for luck!! I hope his genius rubs off on me!

I didn't take many photos, and the ones I did take didn't come out very well because of the huge windows.  But here are a few of my friends reading their picture books. 

  Ammi-Joan Paquette reading The Tiptoe Guide to Tracking Fairies.

  Linda Urban reading Mouse Was Mad. 

  And Kate Messner reading Seamonster's First Day. 

It was a lovely time and I even saw a rainbow! 

  One of the superstitions in Touch Blue is "A rainbow is a sign of change coming."

One change for me is that tomorrow, I fly to Ontario!  It's my first time ever in Ontario, and I haven't been to Canada in 20 years.  I love Canada, though. In fact, my husband and I had our honeymoon in Quebec. 

At the North Words Book Festival in Huntsville, ON, I'm speaking to around 1,000 kids on Friday (two groups of 400 and one of 200), but tomorrow when I arrive, I get to meet Amy McAuley and her daughter.  Amy and I have known each other for years online, but this is the first time I'll get to meet her in person.  I really can't wait!  I am so excited to be in Canada and see Ontario--but especially, to meet Amy!

The Green Mountain State

  


I didn't have the best weather for my day off in Vermont, but I loved it anyway!  The foliage was beautiful.



  


I looked at my Vermont map and decided I'd drive the Smuggler's Notch road. OH MY. I don't think I've ever driven so many hairpin turns so close together!  The road isn't open in the winter, and I could immediately see why.



  


Here's where I'm hoping there isn't an RV coming in the other direction! 


I drove by Mount Mansfield and the Stowe ski area and saw these gondolas that went up the mountain.  I had time to spare, so I thought, "Why not?"  It was a cloudy day, but it was the day I had!  



  


Also in Stowe, I stopped at this cider mill.



  


I had a cider donut and a cup of hot cider.  Here's the cider press.






And the cook making donuts.



  


My mom is a big fan of the movie, The Sound of Music.  So Mom, I drove up to take a photo of the Trapp Family Lodge for you. 



  


And one of the big treats for me was to see my friend Stephanie on TV!  She's the anchor of the nightly news on Channel Five!  Isn't she beautiful?!!  Her co-anchor is on the left on the screen. On the right is Tom Messner (Kate's husband), who is the meteorologist!  So cool to see them both.

Ben and Jerry's Factory, Waterbury, VT

While I was in Vermont, I had a day and a half off between my school visit and the Burlington Book Festival. So I opened my Vermont Atlas and chose some new places to see and fun things to do. 



   


First, I went to Ben and Jerry's in Waterbury. For $3, you can tour their factory. They don't allow photographs of the assembly process, but it was very cool to watch the ice cream being squirted into the cartons, the lids being put on, etc.  Here are some photos of the tour when they did allow pictures.



   Izzy was our guide, and our group included a whole tour busload of senior citizens from Florida. This photo was taken outside the "Flavor Room" where the workers invent and test new flavor combinations. 



  This is a display of some of their newer flavors.  "Midnight Snack" has chocolate-covered potato chips in it!  Hmmm.  . . I don't know about that one!



   And at the end,, we all were given a sample of the "Flavor of the Day." Mint chocolate chunk!  You might expect that ice cream to be green, but Ben and Jerry's doesn't use articifial colors. It was delicious.


Izzy told us that employees get to take home a free pint of ice cream every day they work.  Now that's a perk!  And Ben and Jerry's  number one bestselling ice cream is. . . .



   Cherry Garcia, my favorite!


After the tour, I walked up the hill behind the factory to "The Flavor Graveyard" where the company buries a pint of any flavor they discontinue. 



  


It was fun to read the rhymes.



    


It was a great, little tour and a beautiful drive through a part of Vermont that I'd never seen before. On the way back from Ben and Jerry's, I stopped at a cider mill, and the next day, I braved the drive through Smuggler's Notch and went up Mount Mansfield.  I'll show you some of those photos later. 

Hardwick, Vermont

I had a wonderful school visit yesterday at the Hazen Union School in Hardwick, Vermont.  This is such a pretty part of Vermont: lots of farms, rushing rivers, small towns, and beautiful old libraries.






And I loved this old, covered railway bridge.






At my visit, I spoke to all the 7th and 8th graders and then had lunch with a group of kids who had read both Rules and Touch Blue.  Two students shared their work with me, and Garrett surprised me by pulling a rubber duckie out of his lunchbox and giving it to me. 






I don't have a Frankenstein duckie!  And he will look great with all my others. I took a photo of him with Touch Blue on the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award shelves (Touch Blue is nominated for that award, and Rules won it back in 2008).


Thanks for a great visit!  I had some time after my visit to explore, so I drove to Waterbury and went to the Ben and Jerry's Factory and to a Cider mill.  I'll show you those photos later.  Now, I'm off to Burlington for the Burlington Book Festival tomorrow.  

Home from Tennessee and off to Vermont!

   I had such a nice time in Tennessee!  I wanted to post a few photos from my second day. On that day, I spoke at two schools and did an evening library presentation.

  

At McFadden I spoke to all the 2nd through 5th graders.  Here am I with a little group of kids.

  At Oakland Middle School, I spoke to all the sixth graders.

I came to Tennessee through a program that is organized by The Linebaugh Library in Murfreesboro.  It's a beautiful and vibrant building, full of such nice people! 



I had a little fun with the statues out front.

  

Eva Graalman drove me to all my events and then took me out to lunch.  I wanted to eat things that were traditional Tennessee food. I mean, what's the point of traveling if you aren't going to make the most of it?!  So she helped me choose a "Meat plus three."



I had chicken fried steak, corn pudding, sweet potato casserole, with corn bread and sweet tea.  And when they say "sweet tea," they mean SWEET!  :-)   

  Me and Eva

Then that night, I had a full room for my library visit. There were two adorable toddlers in the audience, so we started with Hot Rod Hamster, and then I talked about my novels and signed a lot of books.

And look at this cake!



Each layer was a different flavor, and it made for a wonderful party!  Thank you to everyone at all my schools and especially to Eva and Rita Shackett and everyone at the Linebaugh Library for an unforgettable visit.

And now I'm getting packed for a trip to Vermont today.  :-)  I have a school visit in Hardwick tomorrow, and I'm speaking at the Burlington Book Festival on Sunday.  So I'm taking a deep breath and heading west.

It's a Book Baby!

 Congratulations! It's a bouncing book-baby!

Name: Hound Dog True

Date: September 20, 2011

Weight: 160 pages

Proud Parent: Linda Urban ( lurban )

Godparents: Harcourt Children's Books

Wordless Wednesday

My favorite photo from Tennessee. It just says everything about my trip here.



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Hello From Tennessee!

I'm having a lovely time  in Tennessee!  Three schools down, two to go! 




Rockvale Middle School Book Club.  At Rockvale, I had the whole seventh grade  in the gym, and I was on TV for all the 6th and 8th graders in their classrooms.




Barfield Elementary School is showing me if they had read some of my favorite books as a child.  This was probably The Mouse and the Motorcycle.




The kids at Rock Springs Middle School had a reception with me.




I spoke to 100 kids who had been chosen by their teachers as being exceptional readers and/or writers.


The schools have been wonderful and the kids have been amazing.  I've gotten drawings and rubber duckies and hugs and several kids who have brothers with autism have come up to talk to me.


 It is a little funny to hear the Maine author trying to talk with the Tennessee kids, though.  Occasionally, we have accent issues back and forth.  I do a story building activity with the kids, and we were talking about possible obstacles for our character. I couldn't understand what this boy was saying, until finally he yelled it slowly, "The family DONE GONE BROKE!"


"YES!" I said. "That would be a great obstacle."



It's been such a fun trip, and I have another day ahead of me. 

I'm full of details for my trip to Tennessee tomorrow: p...

I'm full of details for my trip to Tennessee tomorrow: printing my boarding passes, packing, etc.  But I'm going to take a few seconds to stare at this photo I shot yesterday and imagine myself nine again.    

The nine-year-old me would've climbed right onto that swing, pushed off hard, and tipped my head back, back, back so that my hair might've combed the grass.

To see the world rising and falling, upside down.