Forgotten in Bucharest: A True Story?

How it all played out

Here’s the true story. Before the adventure began.

Something Left Behind

Last summer, Steve and I did a 2-week road trip through Romania which also included a 4-day hike along the Via Transylvanica Trail. If you ask me to list the top three things we’ve done in our almost six years of travel, I’d put the Romanian road trip in the top three. You can read about it here.

We got into the rural areas of Romania

But this story today is not about that road trip. It’s about what happened at the end of that road trip. On the last day after we dropped the rental car off, and we stayed the night at a cute little boutique hotel room on Bucharest’s Embassy Row. We had a nice chill night where we recombobulated our gear and carry-ons to their normal travel mode. We had glorious hot showers and a great night of sleep.

The next morning, we calmly took an Uber to the regional bus station where we jumped a bus ride to Bulgaria for a 4-day trip to Sofia to hike the Seven Rila Lakes. Everything pulled off without a hitch. Until we got about halfway between Bucharest and Sofia when I decided I was bored with the Bulgarian countryside and I wanted to read.

I reached into my backpack to pull out my Kindle, and the bloody thing wasn’t there. Steve didn’t have it either. I had left it in the Bucharest hotel.

The room where I left my Kindle

Now I don’t know about you, but my Kindle ranks high on the list of my favorite items. Of course I could replace my Kindle and redownload my library, but I really wanted that particular Kindle back. Having the hotel mail it to Bulgaria wouldn’t work, and our travel for the next month had us fast traveling through Europe, so there was no way for it to catch up with us.

We would eventually end up in Texas that summer, and I thought perhaps the hotel could ship it to our address in Texas. But with the new tarrifs being put in place and the cost of shipping being exhorbitant, it was a ridiculous price to pay to retrieve it. Like Steve kept reminding me, it’d be easier to just get a new one.

But I was determined.

So, as the true story continues, I posted a note in my Facebook group about having left my Kindle in Bucharest. And thus, I activated a relay across eight countries and three continents to get my Kindle back.

And now, the story turns fictional.

The Story Comes Alive

I spent this past winter in my writing studio turning this Kindle relay story into its fictionalized form.

Here is the marketing description of my new Novel, which I’ll release as a serial here on Substack. The book is yet to be named.

Next week, I’ll share

• how I’ll be distributing the Novel as a serial,

• how you can be involved in its naming and its cover design, and

• how your name can be in the final Novel.

  Here’s the marketing piece.

UNTITLED A Novel — Based on a True Story

When Kelly leaves her Kindle in a hotel in Bucharest, she has two problems. The first is practical: 733 irreplaceable notes for the travel memoir she has been writing for five years. The second is something she doesn’t yet understand: she has just set eleven lives in motion.

Through the Nomad Life Facebook group — a community of full-time travelers scattered across around the world — Kelly launches a relay. City by city, stranger by stranger, the device makes its way back to her across Europe. And as it passes through each pair of hands, it carries more than Kelly’s notes. It carries the weight of every life it touches.

There’s Marcus, a retired coach from Fresno who has been composing limericks since his wedding day and has traveled to Ireland specifically to read one to people who will understand. His wife Leenie, who has researched every detail of their nomadic retirement and is quietly terrified it won’t be enough while seeking her favorite glass of red wine along the way.

There’s Grazia, a Cuban-American engineer who left Havana at five on Operation Pedro Pan and has spent sixty years in motion. And Dave, twenty-seven years sober, riding a Harley through Slovakia looking for the farmhouse in a photograph he found in his dead mother’s bedside drawer.

There’s George, a Mexican-American widower making a Beatles pilgrimage through Liverpool, who knows he is really saying goodbye to the woman he lost and a father he never thanked. And Ari, a former film production executive and LGTBQI advocate who has spent three years in European archives searching for the great-aunt her family has refused to name for eighty years.

And there’s Connor — an Irish history teacher who left County Limerick at thirteen and has not been back in forty-five years. The reasons kept changing. The result never did. And his high school sweetheart Colleen, who needs to return to Ireland to find the family she didn’t know she had.

All of them (and a few others) are heading, without knowing it, toward a pub in Croom, County Limerick, Ireland. Toward a stage. Toward each other. Toward the things they have been carrying across borders for decades.

UNTITLED is an upmarket ensemble fiction for readers who loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and 84, Charing Cross Road—warm, specific, historically grounded, and deeply researched across eight countries.

Readers of this Novel have described it as: a book club novel with a thriller’s pace, a love letter to full-time travel, a story about the histories we inherit and the distances we put between ourselves and home.

Perfect for: book clubs, fans of ensemble literary fiction, upmarket women’s fiction readers, travelers, anyone who has ever left something behind they couldn’t replace.

Themes: full-time travel and nomadic life, found family, Cuban diaspora and Operation Pedro Pan, Irish history and the Great Hunger, LGBTQ+ history and the Nazi occupation of Jersey, sobriety and recovery, grief and forgiveness, genealogy, music and memory, the Beatles.

Based on a true story.

Would you be interested in reading this Novel?

Next week, I’ll share the characters and all the details about how you can be involved in the creation of my next publication.

Chris

I found out I left my Kindle behind right after taking this picture on the bus to Sofia