Traces the author's adventurous trek along the Appalachian Trail past its natural pleasures, human eccentrics, and offbeat comforts.

Eight years after his news legend father died unexpectedly, the Emmy Award-winning journalist embarked on a three-plus-year odyssey across six continents to discover the world and, ultimately, find himself, providing a narrative of that journey and the emotional story of a young man taking charge of his life and finally grieving his larger-than-life father.

Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical travel memoir, "Roughing It" was written between 1870-1871 and subsequently published in 1872. Billed as a prequel to "Innocents Abroad", in which Twain details his travels aboard a pleasure cruise through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, "Roughing It" conversely documents Twain's early days in the old wild west between the years 1861-1867. Employing his characteristically humoristic wit and flare for regional dialect,...

Fully entitled "The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims' Progress," Twain's colorful travelogue is a compilation of the newspaper articles he wrote while on a cruise to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land with other American tourists in 1867. His account frequently uses humor to describe the people and places he visits, although this becomes highly satiric at times as Twain becomes frustrated with European profiteering, a pointless historical anecdote...

Scottish-born naturalist and writer John Muir undertook a daring adventure in 1867, just a few years after the Civil War. After recovering from an injury at a saw mill, Muir decided that he wanted to explore the world. He left his life in Indiana and walked one thousand miles to Florida. Without any real direction or purpose other than to study the flora and fauna, Muir trekked south through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida...

In 1898 John Millington Synge made his first of many trips to the Aran Islands in an attempt to record and archive the tales, poems and songs of the three western islands off of the Galway coast. The memoir he kept of his time their makes up this book, awash with stories of the wonderful characters he met along the way and all their anecdotes. He manages to capture a the way of life that is long since gone and it is lucky for us that he took the time...

Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau's experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author's transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place "not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world." In Maine he comes in contact with "rocks, trees, wind and solid earth" as though he...

Madagascar is a land where lizards scream and monkey-like lemurs sing songs of inexpressible beauty. Known as the Great Red Island, it is a place where fossa and tenrecs, vangas and aye ayes thrive in a true 'Lost World' alongside bizarre plants like the octopus tree and the three-cornered palm. And where the ancestors of the Malagasy, as the island's 18 tribes are collectively known, come alive in rollicking ceremonies known as "turning the bones."...

As I traveled across the prairie coming out of Socorro, New Mexico, the morning sun was just beginning to rise in the east. The powerful V-twin and the cool morning air made me feel so alive. It was at this moment that, as the sun lit the mountains with a purple glow to my left and a herd of antelope galloped across the plains to my right, that Ray Charles singing "America" came across my speakers. All I could do was pull over, sit there in quiet...

Female writers share 32 transformative stories of traveling in diverse locations - some exotic, and some more familiar.