Travel Writing Memoirs

Michael Brein’s Travel Tales Monthly Bookazine Issue No. 3 for September 2014 contains among the best travel stories from Michael’s huge collection of about 10,000 travel tales that he has gathered in interviews with nearly 1,750 world travelers and adventurers during his four decades of travel to more than 125 countries throughout the world. The 10 travel tales that are featured for September, as well as each following month, include a fascinating mix of travel stories as well as a few brief vignettes.

"We are all travelers in the 'wilderness of the world' - travelers with a donkey." So Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend on completing this enchanting account of a journey in rural France in 1878. Alone with his pack-donkey Modestine, and showing total disregard for discomfort, Stevenson relishes to the full his walking tour of the Cevennes.

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.

Dana has written two thrillers, Blindfold Game and Prepared for Rage, and when researching both novels she went on patrol with the US Coast Guard, first on the Alex Haley for 16 days in the Bering Sea, and then on Munro for seven weeks off the coasts of Central and South America. Dana was invited to write a daily blog from the ship so the shore-bound families of the crew could witness, as much as possible, the lives their loved ones were living at sea.

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

For many years I’ve dreamt of memorializing our bike club’s history, and I’m excited to finally fulfil my dream. I’ll take you from our very roots, and travel with you around North Carolina and to several different states as we rode together on our bikes, laughed and carried-on off the bikes, and just had a fantastic time spending time with each other.

In March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the North Atlantic. Rocked by 50-foot swells and 40-knot gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. This is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship.

Discovering the Beauty and Fragility of the Natural World: A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. Written by John Muir, one of America’s greatest naturalists, the book captures his deep appreciation for nature as he explores the American South.

In the summer of 1957, anxious to impress an admirer who had moved to Paris, while rebelling against her family, Gill Johnson, aged twenty-five, gave up her comfortable job at the National Gallery in London and travelled to Venice to take up a job teaching English to an aristocratic Italian family. Love from Venice is her vivid evocation of that summer, the last hurrah of the European Grand Tour, when the international jet set lit upon the city for their fun.

It's 1973. Our nation is torn apart by the Vietnam War, and the massacre of unarmed students at Kent State. The Vice President has resigned for bribery and tax evasion. The President is being investigated for engaging in criminal activity. At 23, David Reed has become embittered by political strife and corruption. Disenchanted with his future, he wants out. Along with new friends Rusty and Susie, David leaves everything he knows to cross the United States with little more than his bicycle and camera.

A young man heads off on a journey to find out if magic still exists in the world, to know its wonder, and to see if it might save him when his own life is unexpectedly at stake. Instead of retreating after being deported from Mexico, or beaten up in Guatemala, he travels to the Caribbean where he meets a Rastafarian Don Juan who teaches him about the "natural mystic", a magical tradition that had travelled to the Caribbean centuries earlier with the slavery trade.

On the West Coast of the South Island, past deep fjords, glassy lakes, forested valleys and snow-capped mountains, lies the Long family cabin. It was here that Chris Long spent the first 17 years of his life, two days' hike from the nearest road. In this heartfelt and captivating audiobook, Chris describes childhood with nature on his doorstep—helping his father catch crayfish and his mother grow vegetables, dreaming of helicopter visits, playing with toys crafted from driftwood and jade and learning to survive in the wild.

Durante siglos, los europeos situaron la legendaria ciudad de El Dorado en la selva más grande y densa del mundo: la del Amazonas. La obsesión por encontrar ese paraíso dejó la jungla impenetrable sembrada de cadáveres, lo que no fue impedimento para el explorador británico Percy Fawcett. Después de emprender una expedición tras otra sin éxito, en 1925 desapareció sin dejar rastro. En 2005, David Grann se adentró en el «infierno verde» para averiguar qué había ocurrido allí. El resultado es una reconstrucción magistral dela aventura de Percy Fawcett.

I 1950 begyndte Hakon Mielche og dr. Anton Fr. Bruun en ambitiøs verdensomsejling på ekspeditionsskibet Galathea. Hakon Mielche fungerede som kronikør og udgav hele tre bøger om ekspeditionen. Bind 1 fortæller om afrejsen fra København, turen forbi Plymouth og Lissabon, før skibet nærmede sig Afrikas kyst og gjorde holdt på Tenerife. Nu går turen rundt om Det Mørke Kontinent, hvor skibet blandt andet lægger til kaj ved Dakar, Cape Town og på Madagaskar.

"¿Qué hago con mi vida? Voy a cumplir los cuarenta. Me queda la otra mitad. Quiero vivir, vivir. Giro total." Francisco abandona su profesión como ejecutivo en una multinacional, se va a Nepal y se lanza a una travesía de seis meses por el Himalaya. Al final de ella, encuentra un alpinista moribundo con quien convivirá los siguientes once días entre tormentas furiosas y nieves eternas.

Venice, 2020. As a pandemic rages across the globe, Zito Madu finds himself in a nearly deserted city, its walls and basilicas humming with strange magic. As he wanders a haunted landscape, we see him twist further into his own past: his family's difficult immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, the sporadic joys of daily life and solitude, his experiences with migration, poverty, foreignness, racism, and his own rage and regret.

Jim Payne follows the waterways of America, living a Tom Sawyer life in his 12-foot kayak, getting scared, soaked, and bailed out of trouble by Samaritans he discovers along the way. His escapades span the country, from the Hudson River to the Columbia, from the Mississippi to the Erie Canal. As Payne's adventures unfold, you never know what's around the next bend He's entrapped by security guards at Mount Vernon, loses his rudder off the Florida Keys, and sleeps in Franklin Roosevelt's bed.

No verão de 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton parte a bordo do Endurance em direção ao Atlântico Sul. O objetivo de sua expedição era cruzar o continente antártico, passando pelo Pólo Sul. Mas, a apenas um dia do ponto de desembarque planejado, o Endurance fica aprisionado num banco de gelo no mar de Weddell e acaba sendo destruído. Através dos diários e entrevistas com alguns membros da expedição, Alfred Lansing reconstrói as dificuldades que a tripulação do Endurance enfrentou.

How does a middle-aged wife, mother, and FBI agent pursue her dream of hiking 2,200 miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine? Sticks Harsha balances her trekking ambitions against the responsibilities of daily life by hiking the Appalachian Trail in sections, one piece at a time. Across a thirteen-year odyssey, Sticks discovers the best of America: the stunning beauty and diversity of nature, the quaintness of small towns, the quirkiness of fellow hikers, and, above all, the generosity of strangers.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was a broken man. Reeling from the loss of his wife and stung from a political scandal during the Revolutionary war, he needed to remake himself. Wandering through Europe, Jefferson saw and learned as much as he could, ultimately bringing his knowledge home to a young America. There, he would rise to power and shape a nation. More than two hundred years later, Derek Baxter, a devotee of American history, stumbles on an obscure travel guide written by Jefferson—Hints for Americans Traveling Through Europe—as he's going through his own personal crisis.