Travel Adventure Writing

Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East and the Antipodes, this is no ordinary travel guide. From profane pilgrim badges and Venetian laxatives to encounters with bandits and trysts with mysterious medieval witches, this book mixes fact and folklore to offer an entertaining encyclopaedia of wondrous stories and peoples. Offering a vivid and unforgettable insight into how medieval people understood their world, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages blurs the distinction between real and imagined places.

Many childhood summers, Mark Woods piled into a station wagon with his parents and two sisters and headed to America's national parks. Mark's most vivid childhood memories are set against a backdrop of mountains, woods, and fireflies in places like Redwood, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon national parks. On the eve of turning 50, and a little burned out, Mark decided to reconnect with the great outdoors. He'd spend a year visiting the national parks.

The Rio Grande is simultaneously one of the most watched and least understood rivers in the world. Some stretches of the Rio pass for endless miles through remote wilderness, boxed in by canyons hundreds of feet high and inhabited by only the hardiest animals and humans. That's why journalist Keith Bowden decided to become the first person to travel the entire length of the Rio as it forms the border between America and Mexico.

Ex-cop Jim Weir thought he'd seen it all during his years on the force. That is until he saw the body of his sister Annie, brutally used by a monster in human form, then carelessly discarded. He'd never seen such grief ravage the face of his friend and brother-in-law Ray Cruz, a good cop on the Newport Beach Police Department. When Weir learns that the only witness swore the killer made his escape in a Newport Beach squad car, his disbelief turns to confusion and outrage.

Within six months Barbara Schoichet lost everything: her job, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother to pancreatic cancer. Her life stripped bare, and armed with nothing but a death wish and a ton of attitude, Barbara pursues an unlikely method of coping. At the age of 50, she earns her motorcycle license, buys a Harley on eBay from two guys named Dave, and drives it alone from New York to Los Angeles on a circuitous trek loosely guided by her H.O.G. tour book and a whole lot of road whimsy.

Join cruising legends Lin and Larry Pardey as from England they proceed into the Baltic, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. During their voyage they dealt with armed guards on the Polish waterfront who watched while the people greeted them with flowers and fruit. They weathered a fierce mast-under broach in a Baltic gale. And experienced great friendships found in harbors large and small.

Twenty years ago Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his adopted country. The hilarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, was taken to the nation’s heart and became the best-selling travel book ever and was voted in a BBC poll the book that best represents Britain. Now, to mark the 20th anniversary of that modern classic, Bryson makes a brand-new journey around Britain to see what has changed.

From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”

An exiled prisoner. A desperate woman. A time travel agent willing to break the rules. Malcolm Aldred is starting over in 1868, Oklahoma. There’s just one problem—he’s an exiled prisoner from 2070. In 2071, Los Angeles, housewife Hannah Cole is desperate to escape her abusive husband, and begs Cyber Criminal Enforcement Agent Christine Stewart to send her somewhere, anywhere, in history. When Christine agrees to send Hannah to 1868, neither woman has any idea the events that sets in motion. Malcolm and Hannah adapt to pioneer life in an untamed world full of danger and unimaginable ...

In their book Drive Nacho Drive, Brad and Sheena Van Orden traded the American Dream for the open road, and set off in their temperamental 1984 VW van named "Nacho." After 13 months of humorous and sometimes demoralizing misadventures along the Pan-American Highway, our intrepid subjects eventually arrived at the southernmost town in the world in Tierra del Fuego.

The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la is a breathtaking account of the ill-fated October 1998 expedition of an American whitewater kayaking team who traveled deep into the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet to run the Yarlung Tsangpo, known in paddling circles as the "Everest of rivers." For Wick Walker and Tom McEwan, extreme whitewater pioneers, best friends, and trip leaders, the Tsangpo adventure was the culmination of a twenty-five-year quest for glory. Yet the team's magnificent dreams crumbled when their ace paddler was swept over a thunderous eight-foot waterfall, never to be seen again.

Once in a while, a travel book comes along that pushes at the boundaries of the genre. Quondam: Travels in a Once World does exactly that, asking us to reimagine the relevance and potential of travel. In this case, an epic, true-grit expedition by bike through the heart of Africa without the umbilical cord of technology, when being on your own meant exactly that.

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

From the author of such travel adventure classics as Jaguars Ripped My Flesh and Road Fever, comes an informative and entertaining travelogue through one of America's favorite destinations: Yellowstone National Park. On his several-hundred-mile trek across the wilderness, the author explores such natural wonders as glaciers and geysers, muses about the microbiology of thermal pools, and witnesses moonbows arcing across waterfalls at midnight.

Adam Fletcher's life hates him.... That's how it feels since he lost his girlfriend of nine years, his confidence, hair, and home. But then he receives an email from a mysterious stranger offering him a free holiday of a lifetime. It's too good to be true. But then what does he have to lose? So he says yes. And then things gets strange....

Raised in the extreme religious cult called the Children of God, Juliana Buhring was frequently punished for being a rebel and finally broke away. Her soul mate was an explorer seeking the source of unmapped rivers in Africa. When he was killed by a crocodile, her world went dark. To escape paralyzing grief, Buhring set herself a goal. Never having seriously ridden a bike, she set out to ride one around the world.

The Old Patagonian Express tells of Paul Theroux's train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston's subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered - the tedious Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires.

QUARTZSITE STORIES features 13 stories about Quartzsite, Arizona from Gypsy Jane Finley’s now discontinued website Wanderings: Living the Ordinary Extraordinarily (Stories from the Road). Her Quartzsite stories are based on both her travels to Quartzsite in a Mazda Pickup truck with a tiny box-shaped Stubby camper on the back during five years of full-time RVing that started in the year 2000 – on what she calls FREEDOM DAY – and starting in 2005 on her half-time RVing and half-time living in a mobile home in Quartzsite, Arizona at the Desert Gardens RV Park every year up to the ...

LIFE ON THE ROAD features 29 selected stories and essays about life on the road from Gypsy Jane Finley’s now discontinued website Wanderings: Living the Ordinary Extraordinarily (Stories from the Road). Her stories and essays are based on both her travels in a Mazda Pickup truck with a tiny box-shaped Stubby camper on the back during five years of full-time RVing that started in the year 2000 – on what she calls FREEDOM DAY – and starting in 2005 on her half-time RVing and half-time living in a mobile home in Quartzsite, Arizona at the Desert Gardens RV Park every year up to the ...

Do you have a dream you must pursue, but everyone says it's unrealistic? Or that you're not qualified? Too old, too out of shape? Or you don't have the "right experience?" Glenn Damato was a 41-year-old software instructor who sought to exceed the bounds of his comfortable but humdrum existence. He embarked on an adventure for which he was miserably unprepared. Why did he do this? How did he answer the ancient human question: how do we jump-start growth in our lives? We become something we were not.