Travel Memoir

The title says it all: what we have and where we are. This travel memoir, the sequel to Glass Half Full: Our Australian Adventure, follows our French exploits as we endeavor to rebuild our lives in another new country, after spending four and half years in Australia. Our goal, or hope for the immediate future, is to focus positively on the present so that we can start a new, optimistic future back in Europe. Our main aim is to be nearer to the children, leaving the dark clouds of the challenges we faced in Australia as a distant memory. Journey with us as we arrive in rural South West France; enjoy my reflections, thoughts, and observations about my family, our new surroundings, and our lifestyle. Follow the journey of my writing career and how we start our renovation project while managing our convoluted family life. Once again, we will laugh, cry, and enjoy life to the fullest with a generous helping of positive spin thrown in for good measure.

The stories in this book are all true. Most began with a dream and conscientious study of maps and logistics. Others are true adventures. Most accounts are anecdotes taken from Cliff Jacobson's experiences as a professional canoeist guide in Minnesota and Canada.

When the struggle to save oil-soaked birds and restore blackened beaches left him feeling frustrated and helpless, John Francis decided to take a more fundamental and personal stand: He stopped using all forms of motorized transportation. Soon after embarking on this quest that would span two decades and two continents, the young man took a vow of silence that endured for 17 years.

This is the dramatic and inspirational first-person story of theoretical physicist Dr. Ronald Mallett, who recently discovered the basic equations for a working time machine that he believes can be used as a transport vehicle to the past. Combining elements of Rocket Boys and Elegant Universe, Time Traveler follows Mallett's discovery of Einstein's work on space-time, his study of Godel's work on a solution of Einstein's equation that might allow for time travel.

The symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer draining the swamps and making the deserts bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So what ever happened to the pioneers’ dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine? Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws listeners into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era. Acclaimed author David Leach revisits his raucous memories of life as a kibbutz volunteer and returns to meet a new generation of Jewish and Arab citizens struggling to forge a better future together.

How can one pilot cram so much into a single lifetime? Climb into Captain Terry Reece's cockpit, fasten your seatbelt, and hold on for an exciting journey into the world of aviation. Born to a family of transplanted North Carolinians who moved to Washington State, a young Reece explored the hills of the Pacific Northwest. Hiking in the mountains and being a fire lookout gave him a taste of adventure, but he craved more-and he got it.

Pedaling hard for thirteen months, eco adventurer Kate Rawles cycled the length of the Andes on an eccentric bicycle she built herself. The Life Cycle charts her mission to find out why biodiversity is so important, what's happening to it, and what can be done to protect it. From the Pacific Ocean to rainforests and salt flats, Kate learns that armadillos can cross rivers by holding their breath, that Colombia has more species of birds than North America and Europe combined, and that in threatening species and ecosystems, we're tearing down our own life support system.

Lewis Juckes describes the many new experiences that lay ahead over the next two years, first while living in huts buried deep within the snow and then in the field with dog teams for transport and tents for accommodation. Thrills and rare sights were there, as well as scares and dangers—and tragedy within the close-knit group. This was Antarctica in the mid-1960s.

A personal story promising laughs, surprises, tears, and joy, and guaranteed to warm your heart! When a grandmother embarked on a two-week travel adventure to Italy with her eighteen-year-old twin granddaughters, Margie Miklas’s long-awaited dream became a reality. Excited to share her beloved Italia, she hoped to create a special experience they’d treasure for the rest of their lives.

In this gripping short story, Jason Kearney takes us on a single day’s journey that will linger in your memory long after the final word. Set against the backdrop of Eastern Europe, this is more than just a tale of travel—it’s an odyssey through the raw, unfiltered challenges of life on the road.

Run Barefoot on Cactus is a raw, never-too-late, true adventure. It's a memoir of a woman's quest for love, life, freedom from a tainted past, and a wild romp into the questionable paradise of Lower Baja, Mexico. This is not your grandma's memoirs. You won't find home-baked cookies and a glass of warm milk in this audiobook, but you will find rugged truth that might surprise you. I know the story is true because I lived it.

Following in the footsteps of his literary hero, researcher and historian Oliver Lewis set out to visit all the places to have inspired and been lived in by George Orwell. Over three years he traveled from Wigan to Catalonia, Paris to Motihari, Marrakesh to Eton, and in each location explored both how Orwell experienced the place, and how the place now remembers him as a literary icon.

For decades, one especially daring traveler has set off into the wilderness with little more than a sense of adventure. Dick Griffith is an Alaska legend who made his name with a string of fearless feats: rafting down the Green and Colorado Rivers, skiing solo across the icy Northwest Passage, and being the first nonnative to drop into the treacherous Barranca Del Cobre in Mexico.

The first full biography of Griffith, Canyons and Ice offers a rare look at the man behind the soaring achievements and occasionally death-defying moments.

Rich Girrard is happily married, a father, relatively well adjusted and owns half of a very successful tech company. Like most people approaching 50 years old, he had a few regrets, things he’d done, things he wished he hadn’t. When Rich finds himself again living his life in the 1970s, fully aware that he's doing it for the second time, he discovers the process is far more complicated than he first thought, and struggles to change the things in his past he needs to, while trying to remain the man his family will recognize when he returns to them.

This rapidly aging bird flew the coop - via TWA! I left my tear-soaked, empty nest in the California dust, and joyously migrated to Paris, France! I took to the air with two bulging K-Mart wide-belly suitcases; one seriously emaciated bank account; an excess of self-confidence; and last, but not least, my little "hotdog" and main squeeze...Sport Dachshund!

With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others—Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nation­alities, religions, and...

This Autistic Girl Went to Japan is the inspiring story of a young woman who moved halfway around the world in pursuit of happiness. With humor and remarkable candor, Bianca describes the challenges of applying for a visa during a time of terrifying uncertainty, slogging through endless red tape, and the loneliness that comes with being a stranger in a strange land. Oh, and how she wound up evicting a bat from her new apartment, attending a Pokémon GO event with a bunch of middle-aged women, and discovering the best thrift store in all of Tokyo.

After a shocking diagnosis for a rare pituitary disease, and with her eighteen-year marriage in shambles, Risa's life has fallen far from picture-perfect. Recovering from brain surgery and desperate to get back to her former self, she signs up for the bike tour of a lifetime-six weeks from Canada to Mexico on the Pacific Coast Highway. The old Risa could have done the ride in her sleep, but for the new Risa, trapped in a body that no longer feels like her own and stuck in the company of her brain tumor, Bubba, the ride becomes a challenge unlike anything she's ever faced.

This extraordinary travel book tells the true story of how in 1997 writer Michael Paterniti agreed to take a road trip from New Jersey to California, reuniting the preserved brain of the great scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) with his granddaughter Evelyn. Paterniti's improbable travelling companion is 84-year-old Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who not only removed Einstein's brain from his head during the autopsy but purloined it from Princeton Hospital also!

With no camping or RV experience, author Sue Ann Jaffarian decided to chuck her life in Los Angeles for a life on the road in a van. Newly retired from her long-time career as a paralegal, she got rid of most of her belongings, packed up her laptop, and embraced a new adventure of traveling the country and writing full-time, adding travel writing to her career as a popular mystery novelist. Not always sunshine and unicorns, her experiences gave her more self-reliance, a new appreciation of nature, and a love for the quirky, interesting, and thought-provoking.