Holy Days: Reflections of a Travel Pilgrim

What makes a good holiday and how do you become a Holy Day Maker? How do you travel well - and can you travel without leaving home? How can you extend the life of your holiday?

This little travel companion examines these and other holiday matters in the hope that it will help the reader, as it helped the writer, to clarify her thoughts on the subject, assisting those of us who want to make the most of our time "off" and who want to carry the Holy Day spirit with us for as long as we may.

The author started traveling young, on a family holiday to France when she was 3. A vaguely remembered glimpse of a black wrought-iron balcony and the Mediterranean blue beyond may be fantasy rather than memory. Family hiking holidays in the French Alps awakened her love for the mountains. Her first solo trip and flight was when she was 12, to be met in Geneva by a French family with whom she spent the next 3 weeks, in theory to learn the language and in practice to taste the subtly, indescribably different ways in which we live our lives. Since then she has travelled for fun, for adventure, for education, for work and for love. She spent the first 13 years of her life in England before moving to Montreal, Canada with her family. She completed high school and then spent 2 and a half years in Switzerland. After attending 2 universities in Ontario, she returned once more to the UK for a master's degree in literature. She lived in Ontario and in British Columbia for 6 years then came back to Montreal where she completed a degree and a half in Social Work. After all this traveling around she moved back to England where she stayed still for nearly 6 years before meeting a special Swedish someone on a beach in the Canary Islands. They moved to Spain and ran a small hotel in the Picos de Europa Mountains in Northern Spain for 13 years. From there they emigrated back to British Columbia with their sons and she began a program for the local school district called "Connecting Generations." Sarah has moved between continents 3 times, between countries 4 times and she has lived in 4 different Canadian provinces. During the pandemic, she drove across the country. She currently resides in Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast of Canada where she has opened a B&B. Despite suffering from car sickness as a child, she continues to find stillness in motion. She is grateful for the many opportunities she has had to experience the diversity of life and see the unchanging thread that connects our differences.

Laura Lavender is a renowned calligrapher, bestselling author, illustrator, and Craftsy Instructor from Vancouver Island, Canada. Professionally trained and with a BA in fine Arts, Laura has worked as a calligraphy scribe, illustrator, and designer since 2008. In that time, she designed for greeting card companies, big brands, lettered for book publishers and fashion designers.... and lots of interesting people having parties! She is the author of Timeless Calligraphy and co-author of the best-selling book Creative Lettering & Beyond, published by Walter Foster. She specializes in elegant calligraphy created with the pointed pen: traditional Copperplate and Spencerian, and a more loose & organic modern pointed pen style. She enjoys creating lovely block capital letters from the medieval, Victorian and art-nouveau era. Laura's illustration style tends to be romantic and inspired by the golden age of illustration, a time in which elegant illustration flourished during the late Victorian period.