Quotes from The Fellowship of the Ring: Three is Company.
'You ought to go quietly, and you ought to go soon,' said Gandalf.
.... 'What about the autumn, on or after Our Birthday?' asked Frodo.
.... When autumn came, he knew that part at least of his heart would think more kindly of journeying, as it always did in that season.
Quote from The Fellowship of the Ring: A Conspiracy Unmasked.
....A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea. (Frodo's dream)
Quote from The Return of the King: Many Partings.
'Yes, something of everything, Sam, except the Sea,' Frodo answered; and he repeated it now to himself: 'Except the Sea'.
And this is what a French travel brochure promises for this time of year:
'Les Grandes Marées' (Extreme low tides around the equinox).
'Pêche à pied ('fishing on foot').
And, as you can see, that's just too tempting to resist.
So, we're off to Normandy next week, and there we'll raise a glass to celebrate the Bagginses' Birthday.
*HUGS*
Have fun ! - And bring us a photo (or two) back !
Love,
- Karin.
How lovely that you're journeying at the same time of the year as Frodo. Have a wonderful trip xx
I always get the "travel bug" in autumn, too. There's a great passage in Stephen King's book Salem's Lot -- probably my favorite book, and this passage is unquestionably my favorite piece of American prose writing -- that speaks to that autumnal urge to journey. It's long, but I shall quote it in full nevertheless:
"It [the fall] stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die. Even in your house, behind square walls, the wind beats against the wood and the glass and sends its fleshless pucker against the eaves and sooner or later you have to put down what you were doing and go out and see. And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at midafternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen's pasture and up Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites."
P.S. I had The Daughter of Time right in front of me on my bookshelf but it was so long ago that I read it I had forgotten all about the book. Now that seems like an excellent choice for a holiday book. I prefer rereads to new books because I have great difficulty stopping and often stay up all night to finish.
I'm currently re-reading King's Dark Tower series, which is inspired directly by LotR and King's deep love of Tolkien. That's a lot to bite off if you've never read King before, though (and it's definitely more fantasy than horror, so even though he himself regards it as his magnum opus, it's not very representative of his other work). As a starting point, in addition to Salem's Lot, I'd also recommend The Shining. Brilliant and very scary.