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I'm not interested in the translation as much as the use of the word けど in a specific sentence. The textbook presents it as 'but' and 'so', and the dialogue where it appears is as follows:
たけしくん、今度の休み、予定ある？
ううん。別に。どうして？
みちこさんの長野のうちにいこうと思ってるんだけど、一緒に行かない？
I understand the sentence in general, but not the use of けど. She explains what she's going to do and offers an invitation to たけしくん, but I don't get the けど at the end of the explanation of her plans.
In this case think of if as meaning 'so'. In the first part of the sentence the speaker is presenting the fact that he is planning to go to michiko-san's house and in the second part he's inviting Takeshi-kun to go along. In English it would be the same as:
I'm going to do X, so would you like to join me?
Like sova said, けど can be a queue to let the other person talk, but in the example above that is not the case. If the speaker had paused a couple of beats then Takeshi-kun would realize that he's being invited to come along without the speaker needing to finish his sentence
みちこさんの長野のうちにいこうと思ってるんだけど…
Then Takeshi-kun would need to either say yes or give an excuse as to why he can't go (culturally in Japanese you must give a valid excuse why you can't hang out with someone. Simply saying because I don't want to is rude so it's always good to have a response chambered.)
One bad habit that students of Japanese often have, is saying けど and then pausing to think. When speaking to a native speaker, they assume that person is either letting them talk or that they cannot express what they want to say. There are signifiers that you're thinking like あの but the differ depending on if you're talking to friends or teachers, etc. That's different subject so I wont discuss it further.
Sorry for deviating from your question a bit but I also wanted to clear up Sova's point and I don't have enough reputation yet to comment.
けど and が are very similar. In spoken language, けど is a very cool way of saying "I relinquish my speaking time to you" but sometimes it is also a polite pause.
けど is shortened from けれども which can also sometimes become けども
You could just as easily write が in the sentence you provided, but けど tends to be more colloquial.
