After eight years of owning their barge, Hennie-Ha, eight years involving catastrophe and crisis, Val and her partner finally go 'faring' to France for the first time. This travelogue is about the places they visit and the people they meet along the canals on their route from the Netherlands, through Belgium and into northern France. It tells a gentle story about how they experience their life on board during the four weeks they spent cruising. Written as a journal, it follows them on their travels through rain and shine and reveals how day by day, Val learns to cast aside the stresses and demands of her job and to appreciate life's simplest of pleasures to the full. And why 'Faring to France on a Shoe'? Well, download a sample and then all will be clear, or just have a 'look inside'!

    One minute we were living life and doing our thing, the next, most of us were advised to stay at home for a month or more.

    Three modern day Tom Sawyers, with no caving expertise but an abundance of bravado, made Hannibal ground zero for a terrifying calamity that would leave its traumatic mark for half a century. Joel Hoag, his brother Billy, and their friend Craig Dowell vanished after exploring a vast and complex maze cave system that had been exposed by highway construction. Fifty years later, their fate remains the ultimate unsolved mystery.

    Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can’t go, it’s all paid for, just book a flight to Miami.Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Bonefish are prized for their elusiveness and their tenacity. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose accuracy and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think, said one fisherman, before they think it.By the time Dombrowski meets Pinder, however, he has been abandoned by the industry he helped build. With cataracts from a lifetime of staring at the water and a tiny severance package after forty years of service, he watches as the world of his beloved bonefish is degraded by tourists he himself did so much to attract. But as Pinder’s stories unfold, Dombrowski discovers a profound integrity and wisdom in the guide’s life.

    Paine wrote fiction, humor, verse and edited several magazines, but his outstanding work was a three-volume biography of Mark Twain, with whom he lived and traveled for four years. His travel books, all widely circulated, included The Car That Went Abroad; The Ship Dwellers; and this volume, The Tent Dwellers. In the Tent Dwellers, Paine describes the fishing/canoeing expedition on the waterways in southwest Nova Scotia, Canada, he made with his friend Eddie and their guides in 1908. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing. Due to the age and scarcity of the original we reproduced, some pages may be spotty, faded or difficult to read.

    Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.

    Half a decade later, she’s still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.           The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.           Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?

    Driving the car is Michael Paterniti, a young journalist from Maine. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955--and simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years.On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars.Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature. With the brain as both cargo and talisman, Paterniti perceives every motel, truck-stop diner, and roadside attraction as a weigh station for the American dream in the wake of the scientist's mind-blowing legacy. Finally, inspired by the man who gave a skeptical world a glimpse of its cosmic origins, this extraordinary writer weaves his own unified field theory of time, love, and the power to believe, once again, in eternity.

    The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of “America, the Beautiful” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV and in the pages of Sports Illustrated. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction.Author Ben Montgomery was given unprecedented access to Gatewood’s own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence, and interviewed surviving family members and those she met along her hike, all to answer the question so many asked: Why did she do it? The story of Grandma Gatewood will inspire readers of all ages by illustrating the full power of human spirit and determination. Even those who know of Gatewood don’t know the full story—a story of triumph from pain, rebellion from brutality, hope from suffering.

    The Complete Idiot's Guide (r) to Backpacking and Hiking helps anyone prepare and plan for a rewarding adventure. Covers planning, training, shopping and packing for the trip. -How to live on the trail-First aid and other safety tips-Practical time- and money-saving hints-What gear is necessary and what isn't-Special considerations when travelling with groups or pets

    it was a dark place to be. No Direction Home tells the story of the series of events that landed Greg there, what it was like, and how he adventurously escaped. It starts on the first day of middle school in an upscale neighborhood in Long Island, New York. Greg was labeled the biggest piece of shit in sixth grade because of a few unfortunate circumstances, and there seemed to be no hope for redemption. Then one day everything changed, but it was a bit too late. Greg was on a crusade for vengeance.What ensues is a chain reaction of escapades, filled with theft, drug addiction, prostitution, suspension, and eventually, permanent relocation to residential rehabs across the country. Still, nothing could calm him down. He was a bit too off the hinges by then for rehabilitation, and after a scuffle with anti-Semitic cohorts at an inpatient rehab and a daring escape with a girl "too good to be true," he's scooped up and transferred to Hidden Lake Academy, a fucked up place tucked in the obscurity of the Appalachian Mountains. From that point on, all bets are off and there is one mission, and one mission only: get out. His attempted escape morphs into a chaotic tale of homelessness, bad crowds, rancid romance, and bravery in all the wrong places, but one thing is for sure... Greg will never be the same. The question is, will he ever find his way home?

    Perry Groves spent over a decade in the footballing spotlight. Sometimes he was at the top, often he was at the bottom and that's half the reason the fans loved him so much--and still do. This is the most truthful and hilarious book about professional football you will ever read. Perry Groves was the first signing by the legendary Arsenal manager George Graham, and that unmistakeable figure with his Tin-Tin haircut and cheeky grin was a player in one of the Gunners' greatest sides. Now he has decided to tell all about his rollercoaster years of booze binges, girl-chasing and gambling sprees. He's a nonstop fund of of hilarious anecdotes, recounting top-flight games played with a hangover, 125 mph motorway chases with international stars, visits to a brothel with an England World Cup hero and revealing how one drunken escapade ended with a group of internationals beting questioned over an attempted murder charge. This is a unique chance to find out what top-flight footballers really get up to off the field and how they behave when the dressing room door is closed.

    Hughes, author of the Word Writers Bible study series, has been there, yet she's found a peace that runs deeper than her circumstances. In Deeper Waters, she invites you to...learn to hear God's voice through the pages of His Worddiscover a joy you never thought possible when reading the Biblemake connections in Scripture that transform your way of thinking and livingYou don't have to be in seminary to be a serious student of the Bible. God's Word is for everyone. Dive in and experience the joy that awaits in deeper waters.

    And every year, more than 30,000 adventure tourists try. But for each person who goes to the mountain, there are thousands more who chat about it at cocktail parties, making plans to go...someday. That's how Daniel Dorr got started: flirting with a beautiful brunette over hot cocoa and spouting impressive plans. Six months later, he was lying on the cold gravel trail at 18,000 feet, panting and hacking in the darkness.Dorr is a typical marketing exec by day but, amped up by his re-acquaintance with a romantic interest, he gained the determination to pursue one of his lifelong dreams -- summiting Kilimanjaro. When Dorr left behind the familiarity of his weekend-warrior lifestyle in Southern California to reach the top of the 19,340-foot peak, he didn't realize he would cross a threshold to a new way of life. As he fondles expensive hi-tech gear, gets vaccinated for the jungle, travels local-style across East Africa, and vomits on top of the African continent, readers share in the rewards, both large and small, of reaching for personal fulfillment through adventure travel.

    He sees the angler's environment all around him--in New York's Grand Central Station, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida Keys, in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. He marvels at the fishing in the turbid Ohio River by downtown Cincinnati, where a good bait for catfish is half a White Castle french fry. The incidentals of the angling experience, the who and the where of it, interest him as much as what he catches and how. The essays contain sharply focused observations of the American outdoors, a place filled with human alterations and detritus that somehow remain defiantly unruined. Frazier's simple love of the sport lifts him to a straight-ahead angling description that's among the best contemporary writing on the subject. The Fish's Eye brings together twenty years of heartfelt, funny, and vivid essays on a timeless pursuit where so many mysteries, both human and natural, coincide.