This is a story about one couple who made that dream come true. The author shares what it feels like to experience ultimate freedom, and outlines the steps they took to get there. The story includes tales from their travels, social commentary on the state of today's American society, and a simple financial plan that will benefit anyone, regardless of their future goals. Throughout the narrative the reader is treated to dolphins and manatees, pelicans and osprey, blue skies, blue water and white sand beaches. Tropical music plays a role as well. Read how music inspired them to execute their plan. Follow along as they transform from everyday working drones to carefree boat bums and beachcombers. This book will make you rethink how you look at life, and money.

    It’s the freedom and flexibility of an RV with the maneuverability, efficiency, low profile, and low price tag of an SUV. Whether you’re going on a short trip and just need to spend one night in your vehicle or are living out of your SUV full-time, you’ll find useful and valuable information in this book. Even seasoned travelers, campers, vandwellers, and traditional RVers will find tips, tricks, and ideas to make life on the road easier and more enjoyable. The book contains nearly ninety illustrations and photos spread out over twelve chapters. You’ll learn how to comfortably sleep in your vehicle, how to have privacy, how to store all of your stuff, what to take with you, where to camp, what to eat, how to go to the bathroom, how to stay clean, how to power electronic devices and get online, how to keep your SUV clean, what to see and do on the road, how to be safe and keep your belongings secure, and so much more. Author Tristan Higbee is an avid SUV RVer, traveler, and adventurer and is the perfect guide to help you on your own SUV RVing journeys. Grab your copy of SUV RVing today and head out on the road!

    It's a vast and still barely explored wilderness, whose principal citizens are timber wolves, moose, giant grizzly bears, and the odd human being. Into this forbidding land, Rich Hobson, Pioneer cattle rancher, brings Gloria, his city-raised bride. Her adjustment to life in the wilderness is sure to be difficult, as is her relationship with Rich and his backwoods cronies. Will Gloria find that she belongs in this strange, harsh land? Told with wit and wisdom, Hobson recounts a wild true adventure story in the last book of his collection of survival tales. These dramatic tales are described with the humor and vivid detail that have made Hobson's books perennial favorites.

    After teaching himself the basics, he turned pro as an eighteen-year-old in 1956 and over the next twenty-three years fought some of the sport's greatest names: Joe Frazier, George Foreman and, most famously, Muhammad Ali (twice). Since retiring from the ring in 1979, Chuvalo has had to come to terms with a series of crushing body blows. His youngest son, a heroin addict, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Two other sons died from heroin overdoses. His first wife, overcome with grief, took her own life. Yet Chuvalo has stoically fought back. He formed his Fight Against Drugs foundation in 1996 and has spent the past seventeen years travelling across Canada and to parts of the United States, talking to tens of thousands of students and young adults about what happened to his family.An inspirational story of a Canadian icon, Chuvalo is both a top-flight boxing memoir and a poignant, hard-hitting story of coping with unimaginable loss.

    Then he discovered the mountains. Making up for lost time, Bullock soon became one of Britain's best climbers, learning his trade in Scotland and Wales, before travelling from Pakistan to Peru.

    Including 21 new hikes and unique "best-of" lists—including Best Hikes to Waterfalls and Best Hikes to See Wildlife—Moon California Hiking leads beginner and expert hikers alike to the best trails the state has to offer. Complete with detailed regional maps, hiking tips, difficulty and quality ratings for each hike, Moon California Hiking provides hikers with all the necessary tools to head outdoors.

    The hull glides in silence and with such perfect balance as to report no motion. I sit up for another stroke, now looking down as the blades ignite swirling pairs of white constellations of phosphorescent plankton. Two opposing heavens. ‘Remember this,’ I think to myself.”Few people have ever considered the eastern United States to be an island, but when Nat Stone began tracing waterways in his new atlas at the age of ten he discovered that if one had a boat it was possible to use a combination of waterways to travel up the Hudson River, west across the barge canals and the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and back up the eastern seaboard. Years later, still fascinated by the idea of the island, Stone read a biography of Howard Blackburn, a nineteenth-century Gloucester fisherman who had attempted to sail the same route a century before. Stone decided he would row rather than sail, and in April 1999 he launched a scull beneath the Brooklyn Bridge to see how far he could get. After ten months and some six thousand miles he arrived back at the Brooklyn Bridge, and continued rowing on to Eastport, Maine. Retracing Stone’s extraordinary voyage, On the Water is a marvelous portrait of the vibrant cultures inhabiting American shores and the magic of a traveler’s chance encounters. From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a rower at the local boathouse bequeaths him a pair of fabled oars, to Vanceburg, Kentucky, where he spends a day fishing with Ed Taylor -- a man whose efficient simplicity recalls The Old Man and the Sea -- Stone makes his way, stroke by stroke, chatting with tugboat operators and sleeping in his boat under the stars. He listens to the live strains of Dwight Yoakum on the banks of the Ohio while the world’s largest Superman statue guards the nearby town square, and winds his way through the Louisiana bayous, where he befriends Scoober, an old man who reminds him that the happiest people are those who’ve “got nothin’.” He briefly adopts a rowing companion -- a kitten -- along the west coast of Florida, and finds himself stuck in the tidal mudflats of Georgia. Along the way, he flavors his narrative with local history and lore and records the evolution of what started out as an adventure but became a lifestyle. An extraordinary literary debut in the lyrical, timeless style of William Least Heat-Moon and Henry David Thoreau, On the Water is a mariner’s tribute to childhood dreams, solitary journeys, and the transformative powers of America’s rivers, lakes, and coastlines.From the Hardcover edition.

    Here is Erma Bombeck, laughing her way through childhood, marriage, motherhood, and celebrity status, even keeping her sense of humor as she battled terminal illness.

    What set their climb apart from those before it, and even those afterward, was a disaster of such magnitude that it became know as North America's worst mountaineering tragedy. Prior to July of 1967 only four men had ever perished on Denali, and then, in one fell swoop, Denali--like Melville s, Great White Whale, Moby Dick--indiscriminately took the lives of seven men. The brothers survive one danger after another: a terrible train accident, a near drowning in the McKinley River, an encounter with a large grizzly, a 60 foot plunge into a gaping crevasse, swept away by a massive avalanche, and finally a climactic escape from the terror of 100 mph winds while descending from the summit. Should I Not Return is a one of a kind cliffhanger packed with danger, survival under the worst conditions, and heroism on the Last Frontier s most treasured trophy--the icy slopes of Denali, North America s tallest mountain--Mount McKinley.

    The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.

    At twenty-three, she has decided to step away from her master’s degree and city life to board a floatplane bound for the remote boreal forest.For sixty-seven days, Anna will be working and living alongside twelve strangers. Together this group of young men and women will keep the lodge running. While the male fishing guides head out on the water with the fishermen who are the lodge’s guests, the women stay on land to clean and serve. Against the backdrop of a vast lake, wild storms, and hot days and eerily still nights, Anna encounters bears, bugs, and the lore surrounding the lake’s legendary pike. As the summer progresses, complex (and sometimes fraught) bonds form between the men and women who work at the lodge and the tension builds. Anna notices a shift in her outlook, too: she finds herself letting go of fears and insecurities and welcoming surprises and possibilities, both good and bad, with a willingness to be changed by them.Warm, funny, vulnerable, and wise, Dirty Work offers a singular perspective on the age-old impulse to leave familiar surroundings behind. It’s for anyone who has ever felt the urge to test themselves and wondered how they’d fare and who they’d be when they came out on the other side.

    A Race Too Far is the story of how the race unfolded, and how it became a tragedy for many involved.Of the nine sailors who started the race, four realised the madness of the undertaking and pulled out within weeks. The remaining five each have their own remarkable story. Chay Blyth, fresh from rowing the Atlantic with John Ridgway, had no sailing experience but managed to sail round the Cape of Good Hope before retiring. Nigel Tetley sank whilst in the lead with 1,100 nautical miles to go, surviving but dying in tragic circumstances two years later. Donald Crowhurst began showing signs of mental illness and tried to fake a round the world voyage. His boat was discovered adrift in an apparent suicide, but his body was never found. Bernard Moitessier abandoned the race whilst in a strong position and carried on to Tahiti, where he settled and fathered a child by a local woman despite having a wife and family in Paris. Robin Knox-Johnston was the only one to complete the race.It has undoubtedly become the most legendary of modern stories of men pitting themselves against the sea. Forty years on, Chris Eakin recreates the drama of the epic race, talking to all those touched by the tragedies surrounding the Golden Globe: the survivors, the widows and the children of those who died. It is a book that both evokes the primary wonder of the adventure itself and reflects on what it has come to mean to both those involved and the rest of us in the forty years since.

    Johnson’s greatness to Bono’s gratingness, from doubts about Obama to utter belief in Don Cherry, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s outstanding oeuvre to — well, Pamela Anderson.The topics are as eclectic and wide ranging as the intelligence that put them together. The perspective is thoroughly Canadian, and so are many of the recurring topics and themes: of our domestic politics and our military involvements abroad, of our national identity, of human rights and human decency. You’ll find assessments of the reputations of Paul Martin, Conrad Black, Adrienne Clarkson, and Tim Hortons; tough but affectionate views of Newfoundland — of course — but also from Rex Murphy’s constant travels across Canada.But all the world is here, in all its glory and folly. The hard-hitting attacks on politicians, celebrities, those who would ban smoking, and anyone who uses the expression “global warming denial” will have you cheering or tearing your hair out, depending. You will be informed, infuriated perhaps, but always fascinated.

    A jaunt through such far-flung locations as Ireland, Australia, Mexico, South America, and beyond, here is a collection of tales woven together with one central theme: the world is a much smaller place when you view it from the seat of a bicycle.Whether he’s weekending in the buff after accidentally stumbling into a nudist colony wedding, knocking back red wine in tin cans with a gun-toting ex–bounty hunter, combing the countryside in a quest to find the all-girl bagpipe squad he met in his dreams, or playing a rousing game of ice golf on the frozen tundra, Joe Kurmaskie writes of his gonzo global trek in a spirit infused with insight, good humor, and optimism. Riding Outside the Lines encourages travel buffs and armchair explorers alike to get on your bike and see the beauty of our planet and the colorful souls who populate it.

     He would remain part of the French Foreign Legion for the next five years. After swearing to the cause of liberté, égalité, fraternité Manington was immediately transported away from France to begin his training in Algeria. But Africa was not where he would be fighting, instead he and his comrades, from Germany, Scotland, America and the rest of the world, were sent to south-east Asia. Tonquin in French Indochina was their destination, to help quell the rebels against colonial rule that had emerged after the Sino-French War. The Yên Thế Insurrection had been continuing for twenty-two years in this area before Manington arrived, and he entered into the midst of this of this vicious war. Manington’s work A Soldier of the Legion is a fascinating account of life in one of the most famous regiments in history. Although loyal to the legion, he saw many faults in the colonial administration and developed friendships with the locals. This work gives brilliant insight into the guerrilla warfare used by the Tonkinese rebels. Methods of warfare that would be once again used in this area in the twentieth century, first against the French and later against the Americans during the Vietnam War. George Manington left the French Foreign Legion in 1895. Prior to joining he had been a student in France and Germany and a prospective doctor in Paris. After his time serving under the French flag he continued to live in Southeast Asia as an interpreter, traveller and journalist. This work was published in 1907.