Winner Travel: Guides & Essays 2022 Best Book Awards
Can a comically straightforward American man learn patience and understanding in the wilderness? Laugh out loud, latte-out-your-nose funny,with themost heart-touching, curveball characters since Bill Bryson’s A Walk In the Woods.
The Pacific Crest Trail is a 2,600-mile footpath from Mexico to Canada through the mountains of the west, and Rick sets out with all the perseverance and determination he thought he’d need for the six-month trek. But once on the Trail, he learns that what’s brought to a challenge is less important than what’s found while doing it.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2022 Best Book Awards
Featuring 9 Solas Award-winning stories, including "The Trout Baron" and "Tea in Kabul"!
Diane LeBow's stories, like her life, take you to places and experiences you've probably never imagined. They are passionate, poignant, funny, sometimes tragic, and always unexpected. Share a meal with Corsican rebels in the ragged mountains of this ancient island, meet a black stallion in a blizzard on the Mongolian steppes, assist Afghan women exiled in Tajikistan in writing a Declaration of their Rights for the new Constitution, and savor a love affair with an elegant French Baron.
LeBow gives us peeks behind the curtains into women's and men's lives around the world in our search for answers to universal human questions such as how to experience the best our world offers, ways to balance our desire for love with yearning for freedom and adventure, and longing for a sense of home within ourselves and in our worlds.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2022 Best Book Awards
In 1969, naïve 19-year-old American Paul Gorman found himself alone and locked inside a jail in Spain’s Canary Islands facing up to six years in prison.
Five months earlier, Gorman had left home seeking adventure, avoiding the draft and escaping a domineering father. Bound for Europe, he hitchhikes across North America encountering cops and cons. Greeted by frigid weather in Germany, he bicycles south searching out sunny beaches. Grifting the streets, struggling to survive, his troubles explode. In steps the U.S. government with a clever plan to rescue him…and with ulterior motives of its own.
Filled with danger and sprinkled with humor, Gorman's solo journey is the dramatic true tale of a young man searching for adventure, his place in the world, and the transformation he undergoes. Along the lines of Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, Midnight Express by Billy Hayes, and Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale, this riveting tale will captivate and intrigue adventurers young and old.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2022 Best Book Awards
Can you combine wanderlust and motherhood? Margo Weinstein did.
For decades, Margo Weinstein escaped her demanding legal practice by kayaking, whitewater rafting, trekking, and climbing in remote regions. Then she had a son and found herself in the kiddie pool on a Disney cruise. Searching for a new path, a jalan-jalan, that could accommodate motherhood and satisfy her wanderlust, she dragged her young son to the other side of the world, moving first to Shanghai and then to Bali.
Adventure seekers and armchair travelers will relish reading Weinstein's exploits as she battles baboons in Zimbabwe and surfaces under a capsized raft in Pakistan. Parents will appreciate her efforts to explore the world with a kid in tow and marvel at her expat life in a villa where a python on the stairs, a scorpion in the outdoor shower, and Hindu offerings ceremonially placed next to the infinity pool and Wi-Fi router are daily realities.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2022 Best Book Awards
Eddy Ancinas and her friends set out on on a seven-day horseback trip that takes them over Peru’s rugged terrain to 20,574-foot-high Mt. Salcantay, along an ancient Inca route, and then down into the jungle. During this journey, these fifty-something travelers are challenged by events they never imagined possible: a fall from a horse that results in serious injuries, a train strike that leaves them stranded in a remote village, an eight-hour trek on railroad tracks along the Urubamba River, and a moonlight ride in the back of a truck with questionable brakes on a dirt road over a 14,000-foot pass, among others.
It is a journey full of mishaps—and yet Eddy is enchanted by the culture and places she experiences along the way. As she and her fellow travelers explore Lima, Cusco, and the markets, villages, and ruins of the Urubamba Valley, they are deeply touched by the people they meet, fascinated by the clues to an ancient civilization they learn to respect and admire, and enthralled by the spectacular setting where it all takes place: Andean Peru.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2022 Best Book Awards
Despite never having ridden a motorcycle in her life, journalist C.L. Stambush impulsively buys a Royal Enfield Bullet and sets out on a 7,000-mile, 5-month solo journey around the Subcontinent to discover her true grit.
Fraught with danger and near-death experiences, she encounters ominous men, confronts culture clashes, and narrowly escapes homicidal drivers. Along the way, she crashes her motorcycle, loses her camera, her way, and her self-control—crossing lines she never imagined possible.
