Travel Writing Memoirs

From Maia Toll, the best-selling author of the Wild Wisdom series and The Night School, comes the enchanted story of her own magical awakening, a journey from Brooklyn to Ireland that will inspire readers to uncover their own inner magic. What is the word for craving a relationship with the...

John Gierach demonstrates once again that fishing, when done right, is as much a philosophical pursuit as a sport. Gierach travels to Wyoming and Maine and points in between, searching out new fly-fishing adventures and savoring familiar waters with old friends. Along the way he meditates on the importance of good guides, the challenge of salmon fishing, and the zen of fishing alone. On a more serious note, he ponders the damaging effects of disasters both natural and man-made.

Homme de famille et homme d'affaires, Bruno Rodi a aussi le voyage dans le sang. Il est probablement le plus grand voyageur vivant en terre québécoise. Il a répondu à l'appel de l'aventure, d'abord en se lançant à l'assaut du plus haut sommet de chaque continent, puis en se rendant au pôle Nord et au pôle Sud en ski. En l'an 2000, il a commencé un tour du monde unique en son genre qui l'a occupé pendant 17 ans. Il a ainsi mis les pieds sur tous les pays, territoires et dépendances de la planète.

Charley Boorman is back on his bike exploring the world's second-largest country - home to some of the most stunning and challenging terrain known to man. Canada is a country of extremes, and Charley knows all about pushing the limits. He goes dirt biking in New Brunswick, dives through old shipwrecks in Tobermory and rides along Butch Cassidy's old Outlaw Trail. He also meets a fascinating mix of people on his journey.

“Don’t read a book! Live a book!” barked my big brother, as I lay on my bed reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. There was no way, at the time, that Bob could have known I was, at age 16, planning my escape to Denver, Colorado, leaving behind the never-ending chaos I’d lived through as long as I could remember. And live a book, I did! Many years later, while lying sick with pneumonia on a Seattle bed, I vowed to write about it all. It was a "bucket list" item that was in jeopardy of never being completed. My life’s story had to be told — if only I could do it justice.

This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed.

Once a person hikes a long trail, they catch the bug, but does it get any easier the second time around? Four years after starting the Appalachian Trail with his brother, Brian takes to the Continental Divide Trail for his second thru-hike in familiar company. However, trail life is not always as rewarding and romantic as the pictures you see or second-hand stories you hear.

This is a brilliant dual biography charting British Robert Scott's and Norwegian Roald Amundsen's race to the South Pole during 1911-12. Huntuford's is the accepted, definitive account of the race and a reassessment of the two men. Thoroughly researched, revealing the adventures and misfortunes that befell them both, he describes the driving ambitions of the era, and the complex, often deeply flawed individuals who were charged with carrying them out.

In the summer of 1978, 21-year-old Paul Wilson jumps at the chance to join two local icons on a dream surf trip to mainland Mexico, unaware their ultimate destination lies in the heart of the drug cartel country. Having no earthly idea of where he’ll get the money to pay his share and determined to prove his mettle, he does the only thing he can think of: He robs a supermarket.

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.

After Kim and her husband, Brian, decide to quit their jobs to travel around the world, they're given a yellow envelope containing a check and instructions to give the money away. There are only three rules for the envelope: don't overthink it, share your experiences, and don't feel pressured to give it all away. Through Ecuador, Peru, Nepal, and beyond, Kim and Brian face obstacles, including major challenges to their relationship.

A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen’s career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners); twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles. Lynne Cox, adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica (“gripping”—Sports Illustrated) and Grayson (“wondrous, and unforgettable”—Carl Hiaasen), gives us in South with the Sun a full-scale account of the explorer’s life and expeditions.

WALKING WILD is not your typical safari — no game drives, no cool sundowners and definitely no fences. Instead, it's 605 km of dust, sweat and unforgettable moments as an unlikely group of strangers sets out to walk the entire length of Kruger National Park. Over six stages and three years, they walked from Crooks' Corner in the far north to Malelane in the south, averaging 20 km a day with heavy backpacks and only the wild for company.

In 1930, two novice paddlers - Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port - launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe from the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages.

Bound for Distant Seas begins sailing author James Baldwin's epic tale of his second circumnavigation. His story is seasoned by his adventures during his first circumnavigation in 1984-86 as told in Across Islands and Oceans. Alone with little money aboard Atom, his now-engineless 28-foot sailboat, James embarks on his odyssey without the comforts and equipment most sailors consider essential.

Across Islands and Oceans is the memoir of 25 year-old James Baldwin and his epic two-year, solo circumnavigation in Atom, his trusty but aging 28-foot sailboat.

Unrelenting winds, carnivorous polar bears, snake nests, sweltering heat, and constant hunger. Paddling from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, following the 2,000-mile route made famous by Eric Sevareid in his 1935 classic Canoeing with the Cree, Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho faced unexpected trials, some harrowing, some simply odd. Warren's spellbinding account retraces the women's journey from inspiration to Arctic waters, giving listeners an insider view of planning a three-month canoe expedition to the successful accomplishment of the adventure of a lifetime.

Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a heavy Russian carriage and set out on a difficult journey to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, down the Baltic coast to Prussia, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France that was then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon's return from Elba.

Years ago, an overachieving and harried young mother accidentally flushed her gold watch down the toilet. Time passed, but the image of the lost watch continued to haunt her, a symbol of an overcommitted life. Two decades later, propelled by a series of curious coincidences, she leaves behind her busy professional life, her cell phone, and her family to escape the tyranny of time and walk 500 miles across Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

Travel journalist Kate Wills wasn’t expecting to be divorced after less than a year of marriage, or to be forced to restart a life that had seemed so stable for so long. Luckily, her job as a writer offered her the perfect opportunity to escape from it all. But this time, with no deadlines to hit or all-expenses-paid trips to absorb in a few days before churning out copy for a travel magazine, her jet-setting felt different. There were no photographers working alongside her or assistants booking her flights. For the first time ever, Kate was traveling alone.