Travel Memoir

To anyone interested in small-boat cruising and voyaging, the names Lin and Larry Pardey need no introduction. As world-girdling sailors who roamed the planet on a pair of small, engineless boats that they built themselves, the Pardeys established their hard-earned reputations by eloquently (and sometimes controversially) telling their stories through a series of best-selling books and manuals, and countless seminars and boat shows.

Keith Foskett refused to let his dark mood define his limitations. Unknowingly suffering with depression, he took to hiking the wilds of Scotland to face the inner demons that threatened to gnaw him to the bone. From the craggy Highlands of the Cape Wrath Trail and West Highland Way to the canals crisscrossing the low country, 600 miles of unforgiving hiking terrain called his name.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again. Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last king of the sideshows.

As a journalist, author, and founding member of the trail-blazing band Rheostatics, Dave Bidini has had the privilege to explore Canada's immense geography. Yet, in all his many travels, he'd never visited the Northwest Territories. After an all-too-brief visit to a literary festival in Yellowknife, Bidini was hooked on the place and its people. When he returned home, all he could do was think about going back to the North.

In June 1944, the Nazis locked 18-year-old Dave Hersch into a railroad boxcar and shipped him from his hometown of Dej, Hungary, to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the harshest, cruellest camp in the Reich. After 10 months in the granite mines of Mauthausen's nearby sub-camp, Gusen, he weighed less than 80 lbs., nothing but skin and bones. As Allied forces drew near Dave was forced to join a death march to Gunskirchen Concentration Camp, over 30 miles away. Soon after the start of the march, and more dead than alive, Dave summoned a burst of energy he did not know he had and escaped.

As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.

Ellen Barone and her husband, Hank, are living a comfortable, creative life when they learn their rented house has sold. With no immediate solution, they hatch a plan to live in Mexico for the length of a visitor visa. They then move to Nicaragua. Then Ecuador...I Could Live Here is an intrepid woman's open-hearted chronicle of change and adaptation and joys and discoveries that come with seeking one's place in the world and what it means to be home.

Adventurer Sylvain Tesson has led a restless life, riding across Central Asia on horseback, freeclimbing the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, and traversing the Himalayas by foot. But while recovering from an accident that left him in a coma, and nursing his wounds from a lost love, he found himself domesticated, his lust for life draining with each moment spent staring at a screen. An expedition to the mountains of Tibet, in search of the famously elusive snow leopard, presented itself as a cure.

An exemplary travelogue of danger and achievement by the Frenchwoman Madame Alexandra David-Neel of her 1923 expedition to Tibet, the fifth in her series of Asian travels and her personal recounting of her journey to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden city. In order to penetrate Tibet and reach Lhasa, she used her fluency of Tibetan dialects and culture, disguised herself as a beggar with yak hair extensions and inked skin, and tackled some of the roughest terrain and climate in the world.

Dr. Philip Eyster has been in Christian ministry since 1976. He made his first international trip in 1981, and since then, has ministered in over 40 countries around the world. In addition to bringing humanitarian aid and disaster relief to many places around the globe, he has brought the gospel to jungle villages, desert tribes, schools, factories, hospitals, AIDS clinics, leper colonies, open-air markets, and countless transportation hubs.

"I never set out to hike 10,000 miles. It just sort of happened over the course of a decade." And so goes Lawton Grinter's compelling collection of short stories that have been over ten years and 10,000 trail miles in the making. I Hike brings the reader trailside with blissful moments on the highest mountain ridges to the mental lows of mosquito hell and into some peculiar situations that even seasoned hikers may find unbelievable.

With a destination loosely defined as the rest of the world, Mary and her husband Tom leave family, friends and successful careers for a multi-year sailing voyage. As the voyage takes her farther and farther from her traditional support systems, her world becomes more and more defined by forces outside her control. Mary's travels through often uncharted island communities, provides a compelling metaphor for a journey of self-discovery.

A wondrous, uproarious, and surprisingly informative account of a year spend surfing, Caught Inside marks the arrival of an exuberant new voice of the outdoors. This remarkable narrative of Daniel Duane’s life on the water is enhanced by good-humored explanations of the physics of wave dynamics, the intricate art of surfboard design, and lyrical, sharp-eyed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Pacific wilderness.

Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840. While at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles that affected his vision. Thinking it might help his sight, Dana, rather than going on a Grand Tour as most of his fellow classmates traditionally did (and unable to afford it anyway), and being something of a nonconformist, left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor.

The Monsoon Diaries is the firsthand account of Dr. Calvin Sun, an emergency-room doctor who worked tirelessly on the front lines in multiple hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon the lessons he learned from his adventures traveling to more than 190 countries in 10 years, as well as from the grief he experienced as a teen when his father died, Dr. Sun shares his journey, from growing up as a young Asian American in New York to his calling first to medical school and then to the open road.

In 1976, after graduating from Harvard College, Mike Jacker embarked on a year-long voyage aboard Rhiannon with two friends named Louis and Clark. The three Midwestern boys had never experienced ocean sailing. Mike's captivating narrative takes you along on his remarkable adventures at sea and on land.

In 1948, a young Australian mining engineer named Ben Carlin set out to do the impossible: circumnavigate the globe, by land and sea, in a single vehicle. The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history.

An accurate and personal record from one of America's first breed of mountain men, giving a detailed description of many the lands he passed through and the habits and character of the various tribes encountered.

In 2016, Nuseir Yassin quit his job to travel for 1,000 consecutive days. But instead of the usual tourist traps, Nas set out to meet real people, see the places they call home, and discover what unites all of us living on this beautiful planet - from villages in Africa and slums in India, to the high-rises of Singapore and the deserts of Australia. While he journeyed from country to country, Nas uploaded a single 60-second video per day for his Nas Daily Facebook following to highlight the amazing, terrifying, inspiring and downright surprising sh*t happening all over the world.

In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a 10-month voyage around the British Empire with her husband as part of a trade mission to promote the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. Leaving her two-year-old daughter behind with her sister, Agatha set sail at the end of January and did not return until December, but she kept up a detailed weekly correspondence with her mother, describing in detail the exotic places and people she encountered as the mission travelled through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada.