Before Astronauts There Was Outlander

Picture of the Day for 9/8/2014. Oh geez! I can't believe I forgot to blog about the Outlander viewing party my niece Renee held last Friday. Outlander is a new television series airing on the Starz channel and it's based on the novels of Diana Gabaldon. Any one-sentence overview of the premise can't do the novels justice. It's basically about a woman from 1940s England who ends up in 1740s Scotland married to a Scottish lad named Jamie and together they have many adventures together. See? Sounds like trite romance novels, but they are far from that. The novels are very intelligently written and give you a definite feel of time and place. 

Renee was impressed that we pretty much sat motionless for three hours while we watched all the episodes that had aired to-date. I think we would have sat there for several hours more if additional episodes had been available.

Before my obsession with space and astronauts started in 2009, my previous grand and all-consuming obsession was Scotland due to the Outlander novels. I arranged to get nearly three weeks off work in 1997 and traveled to England and Scotland with my friend Suzanne. I was with a tour group and I was so obsessed with seeing the places and landmarks mentioned in the novels that I managed to convince our tour guide to divert the bus from its planned route so we could drive through Inverness (one of the important settings in the novels). I suspect there are actual Outlander tours you can go on now since the novels are so popular world-wide. Scotland was everything I hoped for. I loved everything about it, but I especially loved the Highlands. They look wild and rugged and untouched by civilization.