There's no place quite like autumn in New England. For the past two years, Clare Hallward, a dear friend of ours from Montreal, Canada, has invited Connie and me to stay at their family "cottage" on the coast of Maine. It's a nine bedroom, four bathroom house that is filled with family during the summer but used only infequently the rest of the year.

Prouts Neck, a peninsula southeast of Portland (part of Scarborough, Maine), has thus become one of our favorite sacred places in all of North America. The bulk of my book, Thank God for Evolution!, was written here last September and October. This year we're back for three glorious weeks, in paradise.

The last five and a half years Connie and I have lived and worked entirely "on the road", living in people's homes, offering programs in virtually every kind of religious and non-religious setting imaginable. We've found that if we work region by region and go at a comfortable pace, it takes us about three years to cycle the country. With TGFE! coming out in November, however, and with a strong desire to include all the major cities of America in the first year of our "book tour", this means that we will be cycling the U.S. three times faster than we normally do. (You can scan down and see when we'll be in your city or region here, and also here. For an overview of where we've been the last five years, see here.)

As I mentioned in my second blog post, "Life as an Evolutionary Evangelist", we don't have an RV, just a high-top Dodge Sprinter van, which is our bedroom on wheels. Because we're almost always living with people, usually folks we don't know, it's a special treat when we have use of someone's vacation home or when we can house-sit or care for pets or plants, as this gives us a retreat or honeymoon of sorts. Because it's rare for us to have a home to ourselves, even for a week or two, we value these opportunities enormously. If you are willing to offer us such a retreat sometime in 2009, please do let us know. After our 2008 book tour, we'll surely need it! Email: Michael(at)TheGreatStory(dot)org.