
I vacation to experience new places, and that can be relaxing, educational, and adventurous all at once. But I stay away from news sites and e-mail if I possibly can. Every night before I go to sleep, I write a quick travel log entry on my tablet, so I don’t forget anything. I use my phone to look up local information, take pictures, post to Instagram, and take notes. I’m all for the occasional sit-on-the-beach-with-a-pile-of-books trip, but right now I’m just desperate to soak up new cultures. That being said, a travel agent can be so helpful, especially when snafus crop up with canceled flights, etc. I feel like you get to experience the trip twice - once in the planning, and then again when you get there. I love to do all the research and a lot of the booking myself. We started planning a trip to Italy together as soon as we got home.ĭo you prefer booking trips through a travel agent or on your own? You get to know people in a very different way when you experience new places with them. It was also really cool to go with my sister and brother-in-law. We eventually went in April of 2022, and I fell completely in love with the city and with travel in general. But my parents had planned this trip to Paris with my sister and me and our husbands for May of 2020. With four kids it just seemed like a lot.

My husband and I never did much traveling. If you could travel anywhere right now, and money was no object, where would you go? We caught up with the mother of four adult children, who lives in Wayland with her husband, Tom, a lawyer, to talk about all things travel. The author, who was born in Binghamton, N.Y., and raised in Lexington, has several book signings scheduled, including one on May 8 at The Sea View in Dennis Port, and another at the Reading Public Library on June 5.

“I think as writers, we are always trained to look for stories, so you see them everywhere you go,” she said, noting that a recent trip to Paris, where she visited the archeological crypt beneath the courtyard of the Notre Dame Cathedral, is part of the storyline for her next novel - her eighth - that she recently completed.

Faye said she often incorporates her travel experiences into her books. “The Half of It,” which was released in April, is the 60-year-old author’s seventh novel.

The book, she said, has “suspense and romance, but it’s not a romance novel.” It’s about a woman who looks back on her life and finds that many of the regrets she has stem from one romantic night with a teenage boy four decades earlier, Fay explained. “You get a lot of older characters - 70s, 80s, and even 90s - and most main characters are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, but there are very few books with main characters who are this age,” Fay said in a recent phone interview. It’s not often that the main characters in a novel are in their late 50s, but that is the case with “The Half of It,” the latest release by Wayland-based author Juliette Fay.
