After ending “A Salesman’s Guide to Hunting” the way I did I had to come up with a
way for Linda and Peter to get together. What better place than a place neither had been.
Why did you pick Vancouver, British Colunbia, Canada?
That is a long story. I was building a sales territory made up of seventeen states. I was
traveling seven out of eight weeks and during the week I was home I spent much time in
my home office. My wife was working 7:00 to 3:00 as a nurse in a hospital and only had
one weekend a month off. We had four children and she would take them to the daycare
provider before work and pick them up after work each day during the week she worked.
On the weekends I watched the children while I did my weekend office work.
One Sunday she came home from a stressful day at work and found the kids
playing outside and me at a table in the sun room doing office work. She came to my
table and asked an important question. “What’s in it for me!?” She continued, “I take
the kids to the daycare in the morning, I pick them up at night, I am exhausted at night. I
have to help them with their school work! You go someplace almost every week, you
enjoy what you do. You work on paper work on the weekends. What’s in this for me?”
I thought about what she had asked. I had planned a “dog and pony show trip”
(product out of the trunk of car thing) for a three week trip to Texas. For these trips I
flew home for the weekends. She had a weekend off during that trip and I flew her out to
San Antonio, to join me for the weekend. There after every six months we would spend a
weekend in a city in my territory. Every two years, for twenty years, we would take a
week and go to the north-west.
I chose Vancouver because of the good times my wife and I had experienced in
the Vancouver/Seattle area.
Why did you pick a cruise?
My wife and I spent our 35 th wedding anniversary on the cruise I placed Linda and Peter
on. I felt that placing them on a romantic cruise would be a good thing. But as I lived
the lives of each of my characters I found that they had other ideas. I thought it would be
exciting and that Linda and Peter would be able to get to know each other in a more
confined space.
How long a period of time does the book cover?
The book covers seven months until on the eighth month they meet at the airport in
Vancouver. That gives Peter the time to plan the seemingly romantic vacation he
expected. It gives time for Linda to execute the divorce. Then the book covers the two
week vacation that Peter had planned. The cruise was only a week so they visited other
interesting places.
You have labeled this series Christian Fiction Romance. Where is the Christian Fiction
in this book?
In this book Linda has found the faith of her youth and that has affected her actions. She
is also influenced by the small town culture in which she lives. This is also reflected in
their conversations with Joe and Constance their table mates on the cruise. It is also
reflected in the way other people treat them in their normal lives, an example; the John
Stemple family. It has many Christian people in it, but they live in a secular world.
Their table mates, Joe and Constance have a very interesting story which is based on
people I knew. Many of the experiences they share are based on the people I knew and
traveled with during my 35 years on the road.
What other things do you want to say about “The Vancouver Rendezvous?
In all of the years my wife and I vacationed and cruised out of Vancouver and Seattle we
had have had some wonderful experiences in that area. I wanted to share some of those
with the reader through the eyes of Linda and Peter. If you were to use the places that
Peter and Linda went you could use the book as a travel guide as the roads traveled
existed at the time and are probably still there.