Some are adventurers seeking danger from the back of their horses. Others are travelers discovering the beauties of the countryside they slowly ride through. A few are searching for inner truths while cantering across desolate parts of the planet. Then there is Messanie Wilkins. She was acting on orders from the Lord! In 1954, at the age of 63, Wilkins had plenty to worry about. A destitute spinster in ill health, Wilkins had been told she had less than two years left to live, provided she spent them quietly. With no family ties, no money, and no future in her native Maine, Wilkins decided to take a daring step. Using the money she had made from selling homemade pickles, Wilkins bought a tired summer camp horse and made preparations to ride from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. Yet before leaving she flipped a coin, asking God to direct her to go or not. When the coin came up heads several times in a row, one of America's most unlikely equestrian heroines set off. What followed was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable equestrian journeys. Accompanied by her faithful horse, Tarzan, Wilkins suffered through a host of obstacles including blistering deserts and freezing snow storms, yet never lost faith that she would complete her 7,000 mile odyssey. "Last of the Saddle Tramps" is thus the warm and humorous story of a humble American heroine bound for adventure and the Pacific Ocean. The classic tale is amply illustrated with photographs.

    The kids writhe about in the V05 shampoo they just spilt, laughing as the last of their clean clothes bite the dust, and I'm thinking: "Survive driving round England with two under 4s, staying at a different hotel each night and visiting four or five attractions a day and sometimes a restaurant in the evening. Sleep all in the same room, go to bed at 7 p.m. after having had no evening to yourself, wake up at 7 a.m. and do it all again the next day with the prospect of another 140 nights of the same—then come and tell me about survival in your khaki ****ing shorts, Ray." They were bored, broke, burned out, and turning 40. So when Ben and his wife Dinah were approached to write a guidebook about family travel, they embraced the open road, ignoring friends' warnings: "One of you will come back chopped up in a bin bag in the roof box." Featuring deadly puff adders, Billie Piper's pajamas, and a friend of Hitler's, it's a story about love, death, falling out, moving on, and growing up, and 8,000 misguided miles in a Vauxhall Astra.

    The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born. Travelling as a 'modern troubadour' without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep. Walking Home describes this extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey. It's a story about Britain's remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. It's about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. It's nature writing, but with people at its heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.

    In this entertaining and frequently hilarious book, Mark takes us on a journey not only of 1111 miles, but of the highs and lows of long-distance walking.'I read the entire journey cover to cover in a couple of days. Totally fascinating, very amusing.' - Howard J'I highly recommend that people read it from start to finish. It is a great tale ' - Peter K'Thank you for being so enthusiastic about travelling and revealing your passion in such a constructive way ' - Jenny S'A certain cure for a jaded outlook.' - Marilyn S'You can't put it down.' - Frank W'A great job ' - Kevin P

    After planning the entire trip on the back of a beer mat, buying a 1958 decommissioned milk float on eBay, and charging its tired batteries, the team set off from Lowestoft to Lands End. On the way, they discovered that their float needs to charge for eight hours for every two hours it spends on the road. Relying on the milk of human kindness, they were at the mercy of strangers every night, sometimes even using other people's cookers just to keep the show on the road. En route, they were treated to tea and rock cakes by the Vice President of the Women's Institutes, succeeded in blacking out a Cornish campsite while charging their float (now dubbed The Mighty One), stayed with the monks at Buckfast Abbey where they undertook a vow of silence, and drove 500 miles to Tintagel, the birth place of King Arthur, only to find it had closed—all in the name of discovering lost England. You may be thinking: why on earth don't these men drive a car like normal people? But this is no ordinary journey. This is an eccentric odyssey through the English countryside. Three Men in a Float is about all things English and the pleasure to be had if you are prepared to slow down, get out of your car, and go off the beaten track.

    It tells the story of two mates, a kayak, and the conquest of the Tasman.

    

    After a decade spent making more than 80 programmes he has become a familiar face on British TV, well known for his extraordinary journeys across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world. But what most people don't know is that Simon's own journey started in a rough area of Acton, West London where he was brought up and left school with no qualifications. For the first time he will tell his life story with a book rich in anecdotes to entertain and inform readers about some of the most fascinating (and often dangerous) places in the world and what it took to reach them.

    On programmes such as My Word! and My Music his distinctive voice became familiar to millions as he displayed an astonishingly well-stocked mind and a genius for ad libbing and outrageous puns. Later, working at the BBC and then at London Weekend Television, he produced some of the best television comedy of the 1960s and 70s. He has written highly successful books for children, and two bestselling anthologies of humour.Frank Muir recalls, in glorious detail, a happy 1920s childhood in the seaside town of Ramsgate, where he was born in his grandmother's pub in Broadstairs, and in London, where he attended an inexpensive but excellent school of a kind no longer to be found. He remembers his very first joke at the age of six, when he knew that his destiny was to make people laugh. He also knew from an early age that he wanted to write, but it took a childhood illness for him to discover that humour and writing could be combined. The death of his father forced him to leave school at the age of fourteen and work in a factory making carbon paper. Then, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the RAF as an air photographer and his memories of the war years, as might be imagined, are engagingly different from the usual kind. It was during those years, with their rich fund of comic material, that he began his career as scriptwriter and performer. At his demob in 1945 he moved naturally to London and the Windmill Theatre, that remarkable breeding ground of talent where new comedians like Jimmy Edwards and Alfred Marks vied with nude girls for the attention of the audience. In story after story he recalls the lost world of London in the 1940s and early 50s, when the laughter and creative ideas seemed to explode out of post-war shabbiness and austerity. Then came the BBC, the legendary partnership with Denis Norden, and half a century of fulfilling the boyhood ambition of that Kentish lad. 'All I ever wanted to do was to write and amuse people.'

    Like many simple plans it went wrong before it started and they ended up with two dogs and a campervan named Tinkerbelle. On the second day of their journey Tinkerbelle begins to self-destruct, helped by the new dog who does his best to eat her from the inside out. This is their story, as they travel from sandy beaches to snow-topped mountains exploring the diverse cultures, cuisines and countryside making up the country called France. Their journey takes them to places out of the ordinary, meeting interesting characters and witnessing ancient traditions. While the dogs rejoice in the freedom they find running on the beaches, Susie and Terry spend a lot of time holding their breath, wondering whether Tinkerbelle will manage to negotiate impossible mountain routes and get them home before she completely disintegrates. Travels with Tinkerbelle is a revision of "A Perfect Circle," previously published by Transworld Publishers. Enhanced features of this edition include chapter by chapter map links of the journey.

    She put on her sparkly crash helmet, armed herself with maps and a baffling array of visas, and got on her bike. Destination: Cape Town - and the small matter of tackling the Sahara, war-torn Angola and the Congo Basin along the way - this feisty independent woman's grand trek through the Dark Continent of Africa is the definitive motorcycling adventure.Colourful and hilarious, Red Tape and White Knuckles is an action-packed tale about following your dreams that will have you packing your bags and jetting off into the sunset on your own adventure before you know it.

    Or so he kept telling himself. But, no matter how busy or tired he was, something kept niggling at him. Books. Books he'd always wanted to read. Books he'd said he'd read that he actually hadn't. Books that whispered the promise of escape from the daily grind. And so, with the turn of a page, Andy began a year of reading that was to transform his life completely.This book is Andy's inspirational and very funny account of his expedition through literature: classic, cult, and everything in between. Beginning with a copy of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita that he happens to find one day in a bookstore, he embarks on a literary odyssey. From Middlemarch to Anna Karenina to A Confederacy of Dunces, this is a heartfelt, humorous, and honest examination of what it means to be a reader, and a witty and insightful journey of discovery and soul-searching that celebrates the abiding miracle of the book and the power of reading.

    The book opens with Leaf Fielding's arrest in a pre-dawn police raid and ends five years later with his release from jail.The narrative moves back and forth between the harsh world of prison and his previous life - from a childhood at a brutal boarding school onto undergraduate days and his LSD epiphany in the summer of love, 1967.Acid transformed him in an instant from nerdy scholar to footloose freak. His ten years of adventures in the hippie underground gave the title to this book - a quote from a Bob Dylan song - they also took him across Europe, to the Andes, to Indochina and on to the edge of the known universe. They also led inexorably to his downfall.

    It is a world in which grown men catch catfish with their bare hands, crowds of people cheer on chickens as they fight to the death, and a woman moves into a trailer home when her house burns down just so she can continue hunting 350 nights a year. Bilger records the eccentric and sometimes downright bizarre behavior he encounters with humor and wit but nary a whisper of mockery. In essays that combine history, anecdotes, and personal observations, he describes each activity, its origins, its dangers, and its pleasures. But Noodling for Flatheads is much more than a survey of unlikely pastimes. Through lively portraits of the participants, Bilger illuminates the obsessive individualism that is at the heart of the American spirit.

    From bewildered and befuddled (and back again) to (somewhat) wise, these narratives recount a journey of cultural discoveries, experiences and the follies of a newcomer to Japan; including (mis)identifying food, (mis)pronouncing Japanese, (mis)pantomiming for necessities, and finally figuring out how to flush the Japanese toilet!