Travel Writing Memoirs

Brenda's adventure memoir, Becoming Amazed, will sweep you off your feet and plunge you into a world where the thrill of the unknown reigns supreme. Her journey began with a heart-pounding initiation—rafting and mountain climbing through the untamed Tanzanian wilderness chronicled in her book Becoming Fearless: Finding Courage in the African Wilderness. What started as a step outside her comfort zone soon became an insatiable quest for the extraordinary, pushing her to explore some of the most remote and breathtaking corners of the globe.

In September 1870, Truman Everts was separated from one of the first exploratory parties in what is now Yellowstone National Park. With little food, equipment, or cold-weather clothing, Everts spent more than a month wandering the wilderness before two mountaineers found him alive: frostbitten, scalded, and delirious. Nobody else has been lost so long in Yellowstone and survived.

Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage - a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of his work. Over the last decade, as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books, Peter Hessler has lived in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions.

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.

A couple of quiet weeks sailing the River Severn was the intention. Somehow things got out of hand—a year later, I had reached Romania and was still going. Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Australian Odysseus in a dinghy travels from the borders of North Wales to the Black Sea—4,900 kilometres over salt and fresh water, under sail, at the oars, or at the end of a tow-rope—through 12 countries, 282 locks and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates.

Viaggiare è sempre stato per Tiziano Terzani un modo di vivere. Quando scopre di avere il cancro viaggiare alla ricerca di una soluzione è la sua risposta istintiva. Questo è un viaggio diverso da tutti gli altri, e anche il più difficile perché ogni passo, ogni scelta - a volte fra ragione e follia, fra scienza e magia - ha a che fare con la sua sopravvivenza. Strada facendo prende appunti. Da una lunga permanenza a New York e poi in un centro "alternativo" della California nasce un ritratto inquietante dell'America.

A wisdom-filled memoir that doubles as a sweeping travelogue reaching from Boston to Sardinia and back again. Gorgeously written and culturally astute. The Boston Globe. When a big-city journalist quits her dream job to move to a remote Italian island for love, she discovers a whole new life beyond the romantic fantasies of Italy spun by books and movies. Struggling to adapt to a different culture, she buys a quirky house in the Sardinian countryside, goes to art school and becomes obsessed with home improvement and renovation.

In 2015, when Alex Silberman was 27 years old, he hitchhiked alone from East Coast America’s chilly Boston Harbor, north and west past Southern Ontario, before finally materializing from a desert mirage in California’s balmy Santa Cruz. Hitchin’ is a nostalgic tribute to the almost lost art of hitting the road and traveling for free (most of the time).

Julia Blackburn has always collected things that hold stories about the past, especially the very distant past: mammoth bones, little shells that happen to be two million years old, a flint shaped as a weapon long ago. Shortly after her husband’s death, Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland, the stretch of land that once connected Great Britain to Continental Europe but is now subsumed by the North Sea. She was driven to explore the lives of the people who lived there—studying its fossil record, as well as human artifacts that have been unearthed near the area.

In 1773, literary giant Samuel Johnson set off with his friend James Boswell on a tour of Scotland’s remote Highlands and Western Isles. What followed was a vivid travelogue capturing the landscapes, people, and customs of a region on the brink of change. With wit, insight, and curiosity, Johnson reflects on everything from ancient clan traditions to the decline of the Gaelic language—offering a rare glimpse into 18th-century Scotland through the eyes of one of England’s greatest minds.

What does retirement mean to you? Do you feel you’ve seen enough of the world? As you approach this later stage in life, the thought of travel can feel beyond intimidating—especially for those of us handling chronic medical conditions. In What If . . . ?, author Roberta Sawatzky highlights the importance of seizing the day when it comes to seeing the world, even and especially as one approaches retirement age.

Between 1950 and 1952, Peggy Iris Thomas and her Airedale dog, Matelot, travelled 14,000 miles through Canada, United States and Mexico on a 125cc BSA Bantam. Perhaps when rounding a corner on some highway between Nova Scotia and Key West you have chanced upon this incredible trio: Oppy the indomitable motorcycle, its 125 pound frame swaying under three times its weight; Matelot, the automotive Airedale, perched on his box, ears flying in the breeze; and our gasoline gypsy herself, Peggy Iris Thomas, who has bumped her way over more than 14,000 miles of the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Preparing for the first winter in his new home, ready to embrace the slower pace of early retirement, he soon discovers that it’s not working. From floods to explosions, from protection rackets to hospitalisations, from coping with the death of his hero to trying to find solace in a confusing and abstract relationship, this is a frank, funny and always heartfelt story of how not working doesn’t always work out, and it might just be Graham’s wildest ride yet.

Hailing from the beautiful island of Barbados, where I was a primary school teacher, I emigrated to the USA as a young boy where I quickly changed careers and joined the banking industry where I worked for Chase Bank for several years. My last job before retirement was as a quality assurance analyst for Mastercard in St. Louis, Missouri.

The true story of the faith and travel of two missionaries through 25 years of marriage. Listen and learn how they navigated through some of the challenges in their lives. Find out some of the sacrifices they had to make to accomplish their goals and aspirations. Laugh along with them as they take you on a journey of learning how to cope with different cultures, adjust to other languages, and experience various types of food.

What’s it like to be a park ranger? What happens when you get bucked off a horse, dangled from a cliff, bitten by bloodthirsty horseflies, or fall smack-flat onto your butt while leading a group of people down a trail? These hilarious and eye-popping adventures will capture your imagination and carry you right into the experience of what it's like to be an outdoor adventurer, camper, and park ranger. With vivid descriptions of our beautiful state and national parks, children and adults alike will laugh out loud listening to these comical short stories.

Since childhood, Lorna has been curious about Germany and her ancestral roots there. She was fourteen when her great-grandfather died, a man who was born in what is now part of Ukraine but who was a self-proclaimed, proud German.

Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. He published in 1872 as a prequel to his first book, The Innocents Abroad. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything--and usually failed. Twain's encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes and volcanoes, even Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, come to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales

When you dive into Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, you have to be ready to learn more about the unadorned, ungilded reality of 19th-century “touring” than you might think you want to learn. This is a tough literary journey. It was tough for Twain and his fellow “pilgrims”, both religious and otherwise. They set out, on a June day in 1867, to visit major tourist sites in Europe and the near east, including Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, “the Holy Land”, and Egypt. What Twain records are the day-to-day ups and downs of discovering the truth about people and places.

Un audiolibro poderoso e incendiariamente honesto: la historia de los 1800 kilómetros que la joven autora anduvo por la cordillera del Pacífico de los Estados Unidos. Con veintidós años creía que lo había perdido todo en la vida, tras tomar la decisión de separarse y de que su madre muriera de cáncer. Sus hermanos se dispersaron y ella se quedó sin pilares sobre los que construir su vida.