How I Travel: Taylor Jenkins Reid Uses Road Trips to Combat Writer's Block
I spent the majority of my Houston trip doing a very long VIP tour of the Johnson Space Center, which was incredible. If anyone is interested in NASA or space exploration or specifically mission control and how it works, I highly recommend this tour and the one that I did into the Apollo-era mission control. We got to see not just the telemetry, but the desks and theater behind it. We went into the mission control of the current ISS, stood in the theater and looked out onto that floor. We also went into a decommissioned Space Shuttle, into the mid-deck and the payload bay. For anybody interested in NASA at all, it's such a great trip.
A city on book tours that has really surprised her:
I went to Ann Arbor for this past book, and I really loved it. One of the things about being on a book tour is that you don't really get to see that much of the space that you're in, necessarily. You go from the airport to the hotel to the event and back to the airport so quickly. One of the things I love to do on every book tour is [take in] the drive from the hotel to the location. Sometimes it's five minutes but other times it's 45 minutes and you get to see how the city changes, what parts are leafy and what parts are more congested. I loved driving through Ann Arbor. I think I hit it at the right moment, the top of June, which might just be a particularly beautiful time. I was really taken on that tiny car ride to the location, which was on the university campus. The buildings were beautiful, the architecture was beautiful. I went through some winding suburbs that were so green and lush. I remember thinking, I don't know, should I move to Ann Arbor?! Maybe I should.
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