This guide provides step-by-step itineraries, kid-friendly activities, and the most popular ranger programs to help plan your family vacation. Thousands of hotels, restaurants, and attractions beyond the parks and 11 suggested road trips make it the ultimate dashboard companion. Exhaustive activity information, including hiking tables, easy-to-find trailhead markers, outfitter details, and backpacking essentials, serves as blueprint for an adventure of a lifetime. With something from everyone this is "Your Guide to the National Parks."

    Did you know that your answers to just a handful of questions can predict the zip code of where you grew up? Speaking American offers a visual atlas of the American vernacular--who says what, and where they say it--revealing the history of our nation, our regions, and the language that divides and unites us.

    Even highly skilled photographers are often baffled by the problems facing them when they work outdoors. But with this exceptional field guide in hand, every photographer—beginner, serious amateur, semi-pro, and pro—can conquer the problems encountered in the field. Using his own exceptional work as examples, the author discusses each type of nature subject and how to approach photographing it. Specific advice and information cover selection of equipment and lenses; how to compose a shot; how to get close ups; and other tips covering a range of techniques to enrich various types of nature photographs.

    In six hundred years, the Celts had produced some of the finest artistic and scientific masterpieces of the ancient world. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar marched over the Alps, bringing slavery and genocide to western Europe. Within eight years the Celts of what is now France were utterly annihilated, and in another hundred years the Romans had overrun Britain. It is astonishing how little remains of this great civilization. While planning a bicycling trip along the Heraklean Way, the ancient route from Portugal to the Alps, Graham Robb discovered a door to that forgotten world--a beautiful and precise pattern of towns and holy places based on astronomical and geometrical measurements: this was the three-dimensional "Middle Earth" of the Celts. As coordinates and coincidences revealed themselves across the continent, a map of the Celtic world emerged as a miraculously preserved archival document.Robb--"one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet" (New York Times)--here reveals the ancient secrets of the Celts, demonstrates the lasting influence of Druid science, and recharts the exploration of the world and the spread of Christianity. A pioneering history grounded in a real-life historical treasure hunt, The Discovery of Middle Earth offers nothing less than an entirely new understanding of the birth of modern Europe.

    They are born, they thrive, and they eventually die. In Atlas of Lost Cities, Aude de Tocqueville tells the compelling narrative of the rise and fall of such notable places as Pompeii, Teotihuacán, and Angkor. She also details the less well known places, including Centralia, an abandoned Pennsylvania town consumed by unquenchable underground fire; Nova Citas de Kilamba in Angola, where housing, schools, and stores were built for 500,000 people who never came; and Epecuen, a tourist town in Argentina that was swallowed up by water. Beautiful, original artwork shows the location of the lost cities and depicts how they looked when they thrived.

    These maps show how our idea of the world has shifted and grown over time, and each map tells its own unique story about nations, politics, and ambitions. The chosen images, with their accompanying stories, introduce the reader to an exciting new way of "reading" maps as travelogues---living history from the earliest of man's imaginings about planet earth to our current attempts at charting cyberspace. Among the rare gems included in the book are the Waldseemuller Map of the World from 1507, the first to include the designation "America"; pages from the Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570, considered the first modern atlas; rare maps from Africa, Asia, and Oceania that challenge traditional Western perspectives; William Faulkner's hand-drawn 1936 map of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi; and even a map of the Human Genome. In an oversized format, with gorgeous four-color reproductions throughout, Catrographia will appeal to collectors, historians, and anyone looking for a perfect gift.

    Spartan Warrior Workout takes you from merely being in shape to having the strength and endurance to withstand the ultimate test.Whether you're a veteran in the weight room or a new recruit, Spartan Warrior Workout will challenge you like nothing you have ever tried before:• Arms and shoulders are sculpted with kettlebell cleans and presses • Abs are toned with windmills and planks • Back and butt are strengthened with kettlebell swings and pull-ups • Chest is chiseled with bench presses and push-ups • Legs and glutes are shaped with jumping lunges and squatsMore than just exercises, the book's guidelines on active rest, pre-hab and nutrition will help keep your body healthy and fueled as you push yourself to the limit and reach higher levels of fitness.

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    The set includes a hardcover book describing in detail the importance and evolution of geography within Tolkien's epic fiction and four color maps presented with minimal folds, including two (Beleriand and Númenor) never before published in this country.

     In this visually stunning book, award-winning journalists Betsy Mason and Greg Miller--authors of the National Geographic cartography blog "All Over the Map"--explore the intriguing stories behind maps from a wide variety of cultures, civilizations, and time periods. Based on interviews with scores of leading cartographers, curators, historians, and scholars, this is a remarkable selection of fascinating and unusual maps.This diverse compendium includes ancient maps of dragon-filled seas, elaborate graphics picturing unseen concepts and forces from inside Earth to outer space, devious maps created by spies, and maps from pop culture such as the schematics to the Death Star and a map of Westeros from Game of Thrones. If your brain craves maps--and Mason and Miller would say it does, whether you know it or not--this eye-opening visual feast will inspire and delight.

    In this expanded tour of the Pacific Coast Highway, Jamie takes you from the dense green forests of Washington to the gorgeous beaches of Southern California. From logging towns to surfer lore, Road Trip USA Pacific Coast Highway covers every aspect of this mostly two-lane route through the unabashedly breathtaking western coast. Road Trip USA Pacific Coast Highway highlights major cities, obscure towns, popular attractions, roadside curiosities, historic sites, and oddball trivia. Exit the interstates and create your own driving adventures on the west coast's unrivaled scenic highway.

    We can innovate just as easily from a ski chalet in Aspen or a beachhouse in Provence as in the office of a Silicon Valley startup. According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Globalization is not flattening the world; in fact, place is increasingly relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. Where we live determines the jobs and careers we have access to, the people we meet, and the "mating markets" in which we participate. And everything we think we know about cities and their economic roles is up for grabs. Who's Your City? offers the first available city rankings by life-stage, rating the best places for singles, families, and empty-nesters to reside. Florida's insights and data provide an essential guide for the more than 40 million Americans who move each year, illuminating everything from what those choices mean for our everyday lives to how we should go about making them.

    Here are the stories of forty of the world’s greatest explorers from Europe, America, Asia, and Australia. These are men and women who changed our perception of the world through their courageous adventures.Organized thematically, the book opens with the oceanic journeys of five hundred years ago, when the great era of recorded exploration began. The following sections look at The Land, Rivers, Polar Ice, Deserts, Life on Earth, and New Frontiers.Many of these explorers recounted their journeys in vivid firsthand accounts; others were superb artists or photographers. The book features quotes from their journals and reports, and it is illustrated with paintings, photographs, engravings, and maps, so that we can experience their adventures through their own eyes and in their own words.Featured explorers include: Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, James Cook, Lewis and Clark, Richard Burton, Samuel de Champlain, David Livingstone, Roald Amundsen, Gertrude Bell, Alexander von Humboldt, Yuri Gagarin, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

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    I’ll never forget that day. The Vietnam War had ended with the fall of Saigon that April, and the world was mired in one of its worst recessions ever. Unemployment in the United States was nearly nine percent, inflation even higher, and leadership lacking. The Watergate scandal had cast a smear across American politics, resulting in Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, and his successor’s immediately pardoning him to close the book on an unhappy chapter in U.S. history.It was not a good time for anyone and a particularly hard time for the old Victorian town of Cape May. The crown jewel of the New Jersey shore had fallen into neglect and disrepair and was dying a slow death. Once the elegant summer home to presidents and kings, it had become the last refuge of the deposed.That’s where I met Tom Ryan. Tom was a king, or so he would have you believe, but unlike Richard Nixon, when Tom was dethroned, he wasn’t sent home with a slap on the wrist. He was sent to prison. He was a convicted draft dodger, but one of the lucky ones released early by President Ford as part of his mass clemency after Nixon’s pardon. The problem was, Tom had nowhere to go when he got out, so he took the money his dad mailed to him and spent it on a bus ticket to get as far away as possible to a place where nobody cared who he was or what he had done, a place where nobody cared about anything. That place was Cape May.As hard a time as it was for everyone, it was harder for me because that was the day I met Tom Ryan. I should have turned and walked away. I knew it when he first looked at me, but I didn’t, not my first mistake, but one that would make Monday, May 19th, 1975 the hardest day of my life. This is the story of how Tom Ryan and I met and how things never quite work out the way you think. You might find a love story in here somewhere. You might not. You might find a message hidden in one of the nickel pop bottles collected by the beachcombers from some of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the world. You might even find a little mystery, but life is a mystery, isn’t it?