Excerpt from Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships

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Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. Well, I can tell you that after teaching high school, handling an unruly gambler was a piece of cake. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." I wanted to write the first realistic novel about casino life from the perspective of an experienced table games dealer. I spent the next five years circling the globe for Princess Cruises. Sometimes life exceeds your dreams. I was awed by the wonders of Venice, the fjords of Norway, and the Northern Lights in Leningrad. I returned from ships with a very special souvenir, my Scottish husband Ray. We went to work in Palm Springs. We now live in Hollywood, Florida, where I write about my casino years while wistfully gazing out at the ocean.

#1 Cruise Ship Novel at Amazon

#1 Cruise Ship Novel at Amazon

Thursday, November 8, 2012

TAKE A WALK THROUGH SPAIN - READ ABOUT THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO - GET IN THE KNOW - GET IN THE HOT SPOT

Do you remember the song, it mainly rains on the plains in Spain? Well I am here to tell you it rains all over Spain. I know because I walked the Camino de Santiago, one of the most famous medieval pilgrimages in the world. My husband and I walked five hundred miles across northern starting near the French border and ending at Santiago a beautiful city.

We have written a guest blog about our walk for Get in the Hot Spot, a very popular Australian travel blog. I love this blog because Australia is a place I visited many times over the years when I worked for Princess Cruises. The people are extremely open and very funny. It is great to read travel stories with a little different perspective than we get here in America.

So please visit our post and find out all about Get in the Hot Spot.

        Click this link to read about the Camino at Get in the Hot Spot


Cara and Ray in Santiago


The Camino changed our lives in so many ways that are hard to express in words. We have made a video of our journey and would be pleased to tell you about it.
Please go to www.caminovideo.com to find  our movie 'Camino de Santiago a walkers guide' or
Click here to find our movie at Amazon

About the author:
Cara Bertoia is the author of Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships. Her novel is really a travelogue, a narrative, a romance, a self-help manual for gambling and cruising, and a real-life story all rolled into one funny, obsessive, and entertaining story of two people whose separate life journeys meet at a crossroads. Kindle Fire Dept. says, "This novel is a gem that is nothing short of a vacation in a book!"

Please check out her most popular posts at CaraBetoia.blogspot.com  to find more blogs about cruising, casinos and anything that catches her fancy.

Below are the links to Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships