Last weekend, I took a little research trip for the book I’m working on now, Boys I Have Dated.
Boys, as I like to call it, is set in the farm and ranch country on the plains of Eastern Colorado. I’ve created a fictional town for the book, but I wanted to visit some real places in order to have the little details that would make my fake town feel real.
My sister came along to take photos and give me somebody to chat with. (My sister and I never run out of things to talk about.) It was great to have the company, and appropriate, too, because a relationship between two sisters is an important part of Boys.
Some of the places we visited were in Colorado and some were in Western Kansas. If you’ve ever lived in that part of the country, you know that there’s not a whole lot of difference in topography.
We visited a beautiful 1920s church in Colorado surrounded by nothing but prairie and several Catholic churches in little towns where a main drag literally dead-ended at the church. We criss-crossed the streets of small towns and almost ran one stop sign. We ordered exactly the same thing at two consecutive meals. We wandered through cemeteries, finding graves that dated to the 1800s, tombstones inscribed in German and far too many graves of children. “Let’s find some old people,” I told my sister at one point.