RTW: Real Life Setting

For this week’s Road Trip Wednesday, the good people over at YA Highway are asking the question

What is the most inspiring setting you’ve ever visited in real life?

This question is actually kind of tough, because I love going on vacation. I write contemporary YA and usually put my characters in relatively standard urban environments. But I do enjoy spending a lot of my free time out an about.

I go camping a LOT. Once upon a time, in a past life, I was a backpacking guild. It was a really fun job, and I got to hike all over the Appalachian Mountains and get paid for it too. Now I own an RV. My old self would be so ashamed of my current self. But I do enjoy a good road trip. Last summer I went on a 7500 mile road trip in my RV. It was awesome!

I was only there for a week, so I doubt I’ll ever set a book there or anything. But probably the coolest place I’ve ever been in Morocco. I went there for Xmas in 2009 and totally loved it. The Marrakesh night market is a great setting! An entire tent city set up and then torn down again every single night. Vendors yelling at tourists in every language imaginable. Snake charmers and trained monkeys. Yeah, it was a good setting.

This is a total aside, but I’ll tell you the coolest thing about Morocco. The vendors there are all crazy smart. Seriously, they have to sell their goods to international tourist to survive, so they’ve learned how to speak like every language on earth. I was there for a family reunion, and my family members all like to travel and thus no a variety of foreign languages. So we would just invent fake identities for ourselves and try to shop that way. When my brother-in-law claimed to be Russian, the vendors sold him stuff in Russia just as easily as they sold me stuff in English and my sister-in-law stuff in French.