This thing smells like pumpkins.

Since the entire Ballroom Team is right now holed up in a magic TARDIS-like carriage complete with disco ball, hot tub, Monty and a smuggled case of Ratafia (thanks, Tessa!), I thought this Saturday Salon would be a good time to think about carriages.

I mean, who doesn’t love carriages? The stuff of Cinderella and newly minted Princesses and period films. They’re all magic in fiction of course…and I’m not just talking about the pumpkin. They’re infinitely larger inside than out–built, in romance at least, to house a very tall, wicked hero, a heroine with skirts that rise marvelously well, and activities that tend to take more space and–well–comfort than any historically accurate 19th Century conveyance really could.

Curricles are the most fun. Ignore the fact that they look like death traps.

But I write fiction, and so historical accuracy on the inside isn’t really necessary.

On the outside, however, I do love the real deal.

I’m very lucky to not only live in New York city, a mere 30 minutes from the Long Island Carriage Museum…which Eric assures me is the nerdiest museum on the Eastern seaboard. The Carriage Museum is awesome. It’s filled with coaches and landaus and curricles…and enough space that you can actually stand next to them and if you’re, say, 6 feet tall, realize that there is no way that you would ever have fit inside one of these things.

Thanks, facts, for getting in the way of fantasy.

This one is very nice, too. As is the life that comes with it, I’m guessing.

It doesn’t change the fact that I still love the things. I love writing carriage scenes — in fact, in my very first book, The Season (an historical romance for teens), the scene that made me the very happiest to write was a carriage scene in which the hero takes the heroine for a ride in his new curricle, and she begs him to let her drive. He doesn’t allow it, of course (because this is pre-romance when he’s still more like an annoying older brother than a heart-stopping love), but I grinned the entire time I was writing it.

Do you have a favorite carriage scene from a novel?