Spanish and travel are just a few of my passions. This Summer I had one of those "Ah ha!" moments that makes it all worth it... all over again!

I was on a brief camel tour of the Sahara with a group of French tourists. As I speak little French and I was in an Arab nation, I couldn't understand much. I simply enjoyed the scenery and took notes on my iPad. That is when it happened. The French man on the camel next to me said, "Hablo español." It couldn't get any brighter in the Sahara at noon in July, but for me... it was as though the lights had just come on. The man, whose name I never learned, translated for me throughout the tour and even helped me out of a few snags with the locals.

Learning a language can be so rewarding! The time we invest practicing opens so many doors of understanding :)

In addition to Spanish, I have dabbled in Swahili, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Arabic. My language study is often influenced by my family's travels. My husband and two boys (ages 11 and 12) enjoy every opportunity to travel abroad, usually to help a rural school. You can see these same travels influencing the subjects of the books that I write.

I prefer to write in Spanish since these books then become useful to me in the classroom (the french one was translated by another teacher). I can never have enough reading material, especially stories that are highly comprehensible to a learner. Last year I had the privilege of publishing a sci-fi Spanish mini-novel with TPRS Publishing.

I encourage you to keep reading in your target language. I do! I like my students to see me reading best-sellers in Spanish and for them to know that I believe reading is a wonderful tool to improve fluency. :)