Travel Memoir

In 2019, Tim Kaine—Virginia Senator and former Democratic vice presidential candidate—commemorated both his sixtieth birthday and his twenty-fifth year in public office by undertaking a three-part journey across the Virginia landscape as he hiked, cycled, and canoed across the state. His chronicle of the journey became an organic reflection of the extraordinary events occurring across America during that time, including impeachment trials, a global pandemic, growing racial protests, the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and more.

This is the diary of Claire Bullimore, a person who was diagnosed at the age of 25 with a life threatening intraventricular meningioma - in other words, a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit! It is not always easy for a person from the outside to see what is really happening to someone affected by a traumatic experience such as this. The book shows the true emotion of a person dealing with the hardships of a brain tumor, surgery, recovery, and then the scars inside and out.

It’s a question every human being endeavoring to find their way in the world faces—a question that rages like an undying fire in the spirit and soul of writer Vincent Russell Van Patten. It’s spring of 2022. Striving to answer this question, Vincent embarks on a bohemian adventure starting in Lisbon, Portugal, where he’ll work and live at a quirky youth hostel in the heart of the city. In Lisbon, the days are golden and the nights bring debauchery.

As a teenager, in a fit of rage toward her father, Jan pits herself against a steep rock face near their cottage. At the top, fired up by the victory, she sets her sights on the improbable dream of climbing mountains. By age 20, she's a nomadic climber with a magnetic attraction to misadventures and the wrong men. Jan finally finds the love of her life, an affable Banff climber. When he is killed in an avalanche in Alaska, a grieving Jan finds comfort in the arms of another extreme alpinist. Before long they are married, with a baby on the way.

Nick Bullock is a climber who lives in a small, green van, flitting between Llanberis, Wales, and Chamonix in the French Alps. Tides, Nick’s second work, is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Echoes. Tides is a gripping memoir that captures the very essence of what it means to dedicate one’s life to climbing.

Sean Mallen was ecstatic when he unexpectedly got the chance he’d always craved: to be a London-based foreign correspondent. Except: his tearful wife and six-year-old daughter hated the idea of uprooting their lives and moving to another country. Falling for London is the hilarious and touching story of how he convinced them to go, how they learned to live in and love that wondrous but challenging city, and how his dream came true in ways he could have never expected.

Spanning 15 years of travel, beginning when she is a sophomore in college, Wanderlust documents Elisabeth Eaves’ insatiable hunger for the rush of the unfamiliar and the experience of encountering new people and cultures. Young and independent, she crisscrosses five continents and chases the exotic, both in culture and in romance.

Having grown up on their great-grandfather’s stories, Royd Tolkien and his brother, Mike, have always enjoyed adventures. So when Mike is diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also known as ALS, the brothers decide to use the time they have left to tick off as much as possible from Mike’s bucket list, from remote camping in Norway to travelling through Royd’s beloved New Zealand. Yet, when Royd loses Mike, he discovers his brother had been writing another kind of bucket list: 50 things he wanted Royd to do after his death.

Faced with buying a car and getting a real job - or taking the money and blowing it on a six-month adventure around Asia...well, there really is no contest! Who wouldn't want to visit exotic places, like Borneo, Cambodia, and China? Who wouldn't want to tackle the world's most dangerous hiking path, tangle with the Vietnamese Mafia, and suffer days in the dreaded Mongolian saddle? And who wouldn't want to try five-organ soup? All he has to do is survive long enough to realize his dreams.

Standing above the dramatic arches underpinning the Basilica of Assisi and carried away by the beauty of the moment, Joan and Roger were determined to move to Italy. It took time, effort, grit, money, heavy doses of humor, and even stronger servings of Italian pazienza; but in the end, move they did. Launching a new career hosting vacationers, they persevered, renovating Le Vigne; an old farmhouse. This is their story of good fortune, at times matched in equal measure with frustration.

All her life, Katherine Keith has hungered for remote, wild places that fill her soul with freedom and peace. Her travels take her across America, but it is in the vast and rugged landscape of Alaska that she finds her true home. Alaska is known as a place where people disappear - at least a couple thousand go missing each year. But the same vast and rugged landscape that contributed to so many people being lost is precisely what has gotten her found.

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After tragedy struck, Mawson found himself all alone, 160 miles from safety, with next to no food.

Eat, Pray, Love meets Claude Monet in this epistolary ode to Paris. What started as a whim in a Latin Quarter café blossomed into Janice MacLeod’s years-long endeavor to document and celebrate life in Paris, sending monthly snippets of her paintings and writings to the mailboxes of ardent followers around the world. Now, Dear Paris collects the entirety of the Paris Letters project: 140 illustrated messages discussing everything from macarons to Montmartre.

Priyanka Mattoo was born into a wooden house in the Himalayas, as were most of her ancestors. In 1989, however, mounting violence in the region forced Mattoo’s community to flee. The home into which her family poured their dreams was reduced to a pile of rubble. Mattoo never moved back to Kashmir—because it no longer existed. She and her family just kept packing and unpacking and moving on. In forty years, Mattoo accumulated thirty-two different addresses, and she chronicles her nomadic existence with wit, wisdom, and an inimitable eye for light within the darkest moments.

As Ellie’s 50th birthday approaches and her ambitions of a steady income, a successful career and an ascent of Everest seem as far away as ever, she begins to doubt she’s capable of achieving anything at all. So when her best friend Mick suggests a gruelling cycle ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats, she takes up the challenge. They opt for the scenic route which takes them along cycle paths, towpaths and the back roads and byways of Britain, unable to resist sampling beers in the pubs they pass along the way.

When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, 'knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.'

In 2012, facing the death of his father and impending fatherhood, Toby Ferris set off on a seemingly quixotic mission to track down and look at - in situ - every painting still in existence by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the most influential and important artist of Northern Renaissance painting. The result of that pursuit is a remarkable journey through major European cities and across continents. As Ferris takes a keen analytical eye to the paintings, each piece brings new revelations about Bruegel’s art, and gives way to meditations on mortality, fatherhood, and life.

In 1995, at the age of 23, Michael Meyer joined the Peace Corps and, after rejecting offers to go to seven other countries, was sent to a tiny town in Sichuan. Knowing nothing about China, or even how to use chopsticks, Meyer wrote Chinese words up and down his arms so he could hold conversations, and, per a Communist dean's orders, jumped into teaching his students about the Enlightenment, the stock market, and Beatles lyrics. Soon he realized his Chinese counterparts were just as bewildered by China's changes as he was.

A veteran dog musher, Dave Olesen finished the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race eight times. After a 15-year career as a sled dog racer, Olesen set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. In four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the south, east, north and west, and home again to Hoarfrost River. His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dogsled driver to loftier planes of introspection and contemplation.

Travel across the US with David Reynolds as he explores Route 50, one of the few remaining two-lane highways running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Driving as slowly as safety permits, stopping frequently and often going backwards to have a second look at something glimpsed in passing, Reynolds talks to people on the streets, in bars and cafes, motels and gas stations. They talk about everything from slavery and the traditional Indian sundance, to cannabis in Colorado and tornadoes in Kansas, and about everyone from George Washington and Aaron Burr to Marilyn Monroe and the Eagles.