Kotor

Kotor is one of the ports of call in “On Board with the Billionaire” (in progress). In fact, it’s the port that the ship limps into after it has been sabotaged.

When I visited Kotor a couple of years ago, I travelled with my husband on a day tour up into the high country behind the city. The roads were perilously narrow with hairpin bends and there were times that I wondered how the bus driver negotiated them without landing all of us at the bottom of some cliff! We stopped for morning tea at Njegusi and sampled some of the local produce (lovely prosciutto style ham)  and some local brandy to settle the nerves! From there we travelled on to the National Museum of Montenegro at Cetinje – a fascinating vignette of the country’s history. Having tested our resolve on the toughest climb, the bus took a much less perilous route to return us to our ship. I couldn’t keep track of the royal lineage that the tour guide provided, perhaps it was the brandy or perhaps I should have read more about the history of the place ahead of time.

Still the trip provided an interesting backstory and a means of entertaining the novel’s guests during their layover.

Haiku:

Cetinje, Montenegro,
Ancient power base,
Switchback roads protect it still.

Kitchen

I’ve come to understand that most of my stories (not quite all) involve scenes in kitchens. The most obvious of these is the kitchen at Rosetti’s where celebrity chef, Vincent, works with French dessert chef, Angelique, in “Loving the Celebrity Chef”. My brains trust for the layout of the commercial kitchen was my son-in-law who spent many years as a chef before hanging up his knives and moving into another sphere of work. Another kitchen was the one in “Happy with the Millionaire” and is the scene of Zach’s destructive tantrum. In “Merry Christmas, Liebchen”, the kitchen is where Jolene goes to find equilibrium when she discovers that Karl has a fiancée. I think this style of kitchen is the one that is most familiar to me. Cooking, baking, producing good food are important to me and a well-laid out kitchen is necessary to that.

Haiku

Comfort and sustenance,
kitchen’s homely warmth
soothes the soul, feeds the body.