Fortunately (or unfortunately?) losing her comfortable office job was the perfect opportunity to do exactly that. At 28 years old, single, unattached, and now unemployed, she took her 2015 Yamaha FZ-07 and built the nimble sport bike into a make-shift adventure motorcycle. She packed it full of camping gear, and set off on an adventure that she had always dreamed about. The problem? Tiffani had scarcely traveled outside her long-time home in Los Angeles, let alone with nothing but a tent and hope to keep her safe. Chronicles of a Motorcycle Gypsy is an inspiring tale of confronting fears, insecurities, and self doubts for the sake of following your heart, all while discovering the many wonders of the 49 continental United States. Tiffani encounters some of the best and worst of humanity, meets a friend that eventually makes her journey a little less lonely, and puts all of her riding skills to the test, struggling with everything from her first time riding a sport bike in deep sand to getting caught in a blizzard in the Colorado mountains. It's a big world outside the racetrack! Originally published as a Travelogue in Motorcyclist Magazine as Girl Meets World, this full length memoir contains the untold stories and the details that were a little too racy for the blog. If you loved Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman's Long Way Round and Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels, you'll love Chronicles of a Motorcycle Gypsy!

    Now going to start the rest of the series."***** "David Leadbeater is a writer to watch. . .a well deserved 5 stars from me."***** "Action filled yarn, with a great mix of history and suspense."***** "Can't wait for another Matt Drake adventure!!"Three quarters of a million copies sold. Boxset 1 is also available at a cost saving.

    Too much stress and not enough time with her family left her feeling that her priorities were all wrong. So she and her husband quit their jobs, pulled their six-year-old daughter out of school, and moved into an old camper van.They planned to take a year off to drive south in search of a simpler life. What followed were three and a half years of heart-warming personal encounters, breath-taking wilderness campsites, and occasionally terrifying situations…...In Mexico, an angry mob surrounded them on a remote road and threatened them with rocks, but just a few hours later, a local family welcomed them into their home, sharing everything they had....While barreling down the highway in Colombia, their van’s battery exploded, filling their home-on-wheels with noxious fumes. Then the engine died entirely while parked in no-man’s-land between Ecuador and Peru, leaving them stranded for a month in a tiny border town. ...They learned first-hand about South American politics when they got caught among thousands of Venezuelan refugees trying to cross the Colombian border, and again when a revolution erupted around them in Bolivia and trapped them in the capital city among protests and road blocks....And they got caught in one of the world's strictest COVID quarantines in Argentina, living for over a year in a small mountain town there.Join them on these and other adventures in this feel-good read about a family trying to find their place in the world.

    Within days their dream becomes a nightmare. After residing in two Italian cities, negotiating the roads and healthcare, discovering art, friends, food, and customs, the Petralias learn more than they anticipate--about Italy, themselves, what it means to be American, and what's important in life. Part memoir, part commentary, quirky and sincere, Not in a Tuscan Villa is about having the courage to step out of your comfort zone and do something challenging in later life. The adventure recaptures the Petralia's youth, rekindles their romance--and changes their lives forever.

    But soon it becomes clear that his motives are not all they seem.At the age of 11, Emily is groomed into being a ‘county lines’ drug trafficker. It is the beginning of a vicious cycle that sees her become prey to one abuser after another, involving a huge child-sex-trafficking gang.The scale of the abuse – at the hands of hundreds of men – is sickening, and at times it feels like there will never be an escape. But then, in the darkest of moments, a ray of light shines …This is the moving true story of how one girl overcame her traumatic past and learned to love for the very first time.

    It was the first time brothers had battled each other in this gladiatorial and quintessentially British tradition for over a hundred years. Only one could be victorious. In this book, David and James tell their stories for the first time, giving an intimate insight into one of our least understood but best-loved national sporting occasions. James, following in his family’s footsteps, is a student at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, while David, wanting to escape his brother's shadow, joins Christ Church College at Oxford University. As the pair embark on training loads almost beyond endurance, their stories reveal the rivalries between these ancient and great institutions. Told in alternating narratives, Blood over Water is an emotional and searching joint self-portrait, and an account of a brotherly relationship tested to breaking point. David's fervent desire to beat his older brother pushes him on, but drives an impenetrable wedge between the siblings. As the race approaches they are unable even to speak to each other.It is only after the race, James wrestling with his final Cambridge exams, that they start to reconcile their shattered relationship, damaged by their pursuit of a shared dream.Not only a nail-biting drama for sports fans, Blood over Water also looks at the darker side of sibling rivalry and asks just what you would be willing to sacrifice to achieve your dreams.

    town, an adolescent girl is unwittingly handed a one-way ticket by her mother to allegedly "visit" her estranged father in Florida. Young and vulnerable, Lockey Maisonnueve has no idea she is being abandoned and sent to live with a vile and dangerous pedophile who would spend the next several years violently raping, abusing and mercilessly selling his daughter's body into childhood prostitution to other adult men. After being rescued by her naive, but well-intentioned, grandparents, her troubled life is further devastated by cancer and ravaged by the subsequent brutal murder of her mother, in which Lockey is briefly considered a suspect. "A Girl Raised by Wolves' is the inspirational memoir of a survivor of the darkest circumstances one can endure in a single lifetime and still emerge with a sense of humor and to defiantly proclaim "they didn't break me!"

    love. Chickens Eat Pasta is the tale of how a young Englishwoman starts a new life after watching a video showing a chicken eating spaghetti in a mediaeval hill village in central Italy. “Here I was, 26 years old, alone and numb with boredom at the prospect of a future which until recently had seemed to be just what I wanted.” Unlike some recent bestsellers, this is not simply an account of a foreigner’s move to Italy, but a love story written from the unusual perspective of both within and outside of the story. As events unfold, the strong storyline carries with it a rich portrayal of Italian life from the inside, with a supporting cast of memorable characters. Along the way, the book explores and captures the warmth and colour of Italy, as well as some of the cultural differences – between England and Italy, but also between regional Italian lifestyles and behaviour. It is a story with a happy ending. The author and her husband are still married, with three children, who love the old house on the hill (now much restored) almost as much as she does. Chickens Eat Pasta is Clare’s autobiography, and ultimately a love story – with the house itself and with the man that Clare met there and went on to marry. If you yearn for a happy ending, you won’t be disappointed. It’s a story that proves anything is possible if you only try.

    At 32 years old, he desperately needed to find direction and meaningful purpose in his life. With no physical training, he decided his answers were waiting for him somewhere along the historic 490-mile pilgrimage route called the Camino de Santiago in Spain. From the physical high of crossing the Pyrenees Mountains to the mind numbing rhythm of walking through the endless wheat fields of the Meseta, the route was filled with many challenges. Accompanied by his “guru” wife Amy, Schirm faces setbacks like bed bugs and tendinitis, all in the pursuit of elusive answers. The lessons came from the serendipitous experiences and conversations with fellow pilgrims from all over the world. Sunrises to Santiago chronicles a wondrous journey of personal growth, physical pain, and outdoor adventure while teaching us all to enjoy life’s incredible journey.

    Riding rental bikes and carrying a bare minimum of supplies, Rob Cocuzzo and his sixty-fouryear-old father, Stephen, embark on a 425-mile ride from Florence to San Donato Val di Comino, an ancient village in the mountains outside of Rome from which the Cocuzzo family emigrated a hundred years earlier.Prompted by Rob's ailing grandfather, who regrets having never visited his home village, the two cyclists pledge to make the trip in the old man's honor. Despite an expired passport, getting lost, some near misses, and other misadventures, the father and son finally reach the quirky village of San Donato. For Italian Jews in the 1940s, the road to San Donato was one of exile, and many of the people in the village banded together to protect nearly a hundred Jews. While meeting his many new "cousins," Rob attempts to unlock this history and glean what role his family played at the time--resistors or collaborators? The Road to San Donato is a generational story that many Americans share and a travel adventure not to be missed.

    After his parents’ marriage fell apart, he was dragooned in, at the age of 22, to pick up the pieces of their new venture, a barely-trading country house hotel that had, frankly, seen better days. Not only was it posting an annual loss, but the fabric of the building was crumbling and there was no money left to make improvements. There were to be battles royal with neighbours not wanting their status quo to be altered, and with the local fire authority who sought to impose draconian new safety measures.Over the years, and with the steepest of learning curves, the grand old building was renovated and transformed to meet the requirements of the modern discerning traveller. Accolades for the hotel and its restaurant were won; together they became a well-regarded destination for a number of celebrities – and those that deemed themselves to be celebrities but were not. Stories abound featuring idiosyncratic guests, overbearing public bodies, fractured family life and animals of all shapes and sizes. The local fire station next door was demolished one foggy night, people were frightened by flying dogs and snakes in the long grass, and there were, as befits a country house, strange goings on in the night. Many were the guests who checked in who really should not have been seen together.A rescue mission originally thought of as lasting for a year or two turned into a 35 year lifetime love affair with a beautiful old building. This is a tribute to all the people behind the scenes who helped to make the hard-won transformation into a great success.

    It’s not her year. With lots of free time on her hands, she remembers watching the Boston Marathon years ago and, inspired by that memory, decides to join a marathon training group, hoping that running 26.2 miles will give her something show for an otherwise entirely unproductive time in her life. A few months later, she crosses the finish line but is far from a Boston qualifying-time.But Amy has caught the marathon bug, and is determined to qualify for Boston, even if it’s just as a squeaker, a runner who just manages a BQ time. Eleven marathons later, and Amy finally squeaks by, signing up for the 2011 Boston Marathon. She completes it, qualifying again for the following year, and then again for 2013, the fated year of the Boston Marathon Bombing.Due to an injury, Amy crosses the 2013 finish line in a little over four hours, minutes before the bombs goes off. Her world is forever changed as she is shaken to her core. She chronicles the ups and downs of her training, delving into the mystical appeal of the greatest marathon in the world and how it attracts those who return to it year after year.Inspiring and funny, Becoming Boston Strong is for every person who ever dreamed of belonging to something bigger than themselves.

    It is proof that, 'if you go looking for trouble, you'll probably find it'. Over nearly 40 years as a journalist and foreign correspondent, Hugh Riminton has been shot at, blown up, threatened with deportation and thrown in jail. He has reported from nearly 50 countries, witnessed massacres in Africa, wars and conflicts on four continents, and every kind of natural disaster. It has been an extraordinary life. From a small-town teenager with a drinking problem, cleaning rat cages for a living, to a multi-award-winning international journalist reporting to an audience of 300 million people, Hugh has been a frontline witness to our times. From genocide in Africa to the Indian Ocean tsunami, from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to slave-trading in Sudan, Hugh has seen the best and worst of human behaviour. In Australia, he has covered political dramas, witnessed the Port Arthur Massacre and the Thredbo disaster and broke a major national scandal. His work helped force half-a-dozen government inquiries.Entertaining, deeply personal and quietly wise, MINEFIELDS is a compelling exploration of a foreign correspondent's life. 'His story is a triumph' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

    Sitting in the sun, sipping a cappuccino, it occurred to me that sometimes your life falls apart just enough to allow you to put it back together in an entirely different way. So I did the most logical thing. I bought a barge in France. Then my wife and I set out to fulfill a lifetime dream of living in the shadow of Notre Dame on the Seine in Paris. From Here to Paris is the story of how we climbed out of our well-worn corporate trench and, together, set to work creating our dream life, alternating between our cozy Victorian art studio in Sausalito California and our 56 foot, 1925 Dutch barge, Phaedra, cruising the canals and rivers of France, inching toward our ultimate goal, the Seine and Paris. This is a story of facing up to the emotional and ego hooks so deeply embedded in the trappings and symbols that define “success.” Of selling the over sized house, shredding the credit cards and abandoning the mind-numbing commute in favor of a joyful struggle toward a fresh life. One lived in jeans and filled with long, leisurely afternoons floating along glass-still canals, through medieval villages and rolling vineyards in the heart of Burgundy. It’s also the story of realtors, moose horns, a mysterious black boat, catastrophic engine failures and how your life can pass before your eyes when you put those tons of iron into reverse and it keeps going forward. It’s about learning the proper gender of things in French, cheating at Trivial Pursuit, cajoling France’s sexiest boat mechanic and why real men don’t do yoga. It’s about realizing that getting to Paris can take years, so you better enjoy the journey.

    In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very different sacred mountains. He began in the New Year, on the South Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This shark's fin of steep limestone walls and sweeping glaciers is the highest point between the Andes and the Himalaya, and one of the most inaccessible, rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone Age tribes. During the spring Boardman was on more familiar, if hardly more reassuring, ground, making a four-man, oxygen-free attempt on the world's third highest peak, Kangchenjunga. Hurricane-force winds beat back their first two bids on the unclimbed North Ridge, but they eventually stood within feet of the summit - leaving the final few yards untrodden in deference to the inhabiting deity. In October, he was back in the Himalaya and climbing the mountain most sacred to the Sherpas: the twin-summited Gauri Sankar. Renowned for its technical difficulty and spectacular profile, it is aptly dubbed the Eiger of the Himalaya and Boardman's first ascent of the South Summit took a committing and gruelling twenty-three days. Three sacred mountains, three very different expeditions, all superbly captured by Boardman in Sacred Summits, his second book, first published shortly after his death in 1982. Combining the excitement of extreme climbing with acute observation of life in the mountains, this is an amusing, dramatic, poignant and thought-provoking book, amply fulfilling the promise of Boardman's first title, The Shining Mountain, for which he won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1979. Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker died on Everest in 1982, whilst attempting a new and unclimbed line. Both men were superb mountaineers and talented writers. Their literary legacy lives on through the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, established by family and friends in 1983 and presented annually to the author or co-authors of an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature. For more information about the Boardman Tasker Prize, visit: www.boardmantasker.com