Peg Herring, Mystery Author

A friend told me the other day she'd started a new British mystery and found it had tons of swearwords and name-calling. Her question to me was "Do you think they really talk that way over there?" Talk of "they" bothers me. Yes, "they" had different beliefs than ours in 15th century Europe, but I don't for a moment think everyone believed they'd go to hell if they had sex on Sunday. If those people believed everything the Church said they shouldn't do, there wouldn't have been any sinfulness, but murder, theft, fornication, and other sins went on, as they do now. It simply paid to keep quiet about what you did, what with the Inquisition and all. I once hosted a teacher from Moscow who was disappointed by our small town. In Russia, she'd been told that in America "they" go shopping every day and night-clubbing every weekend. Spending a year in a county with no mall and not even a stoplight wasn't what she'd pictured

 Facebook was the instigator, as usual. Someone posted a map of waterfalls in the UP, and I mentioned to JC there were some we hadn't seen. That led to plans for a weekend of waterfall hunting. It isn't difficult to find waterfalls within a day's driving distance of us. We just head north, and no matter which direction we take from the Mackinac Bridge, we'll find them. This time we went through Sault Ste. Marie and into Canada, up Highway 17 all the way to Wawa. Most of the falls we'd seen before, but there's always a thrill for me at the powerful pulse of water in the springtime. Magpie Falls (above) is one of my favorites, but we climbed up to see Crystal Falls from above, and that was impressive too. It turned out the map wasn't very accurate, leaving out several good falls (like Magpie) that John knew about from his travels in the area. We were surprised at how much ice is left along the eastern shore of Lake Superior, but it is, after all, Ontari

Here are some songs that are about travel by train or bus, which is how we saw Grand Canyon last week. We took the GC Railway from Williams, AZ, into the park, took a bus tour of the high points, and then had a day to explore on our own before taking the train back to Williams. We highly recommend it! 1. Train: "____ Island Line" (Johnny Cash) 2. Bus "Thank God and ____" (Roy Clark) 3. Train "City of ___ ___" (Arlo Guthrie) 4. Train "The ___ Train" (Duke Ellington) 5. Train "Engine Engine # ___" (Roger Miller) Answers: 1. Rock www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBeZPJ03lW0 2. Greyhound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx8x3LCnYZw  3. New Orleans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvMS_ykiLiQ 4. A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb2w2m1JmCY 5. 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjQsI8BrTtk