“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness… Broad, wholesome, charitable views … cannot be acquired by vegetating … all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain *
Twain’s quote above is my mission statement. It drives everything I do in my wandering and writing. In the last 25 years, I’ve traveled in dozens of countries, on five continents; climbed highest mountains, backpacked South America, raced across Vietnam, run parts of the Sahara (Morocco) and Ina (Peru) deserts on foot, mountain bike raced in South Africa, and walked thousands of miles in Europe and visited more cathedrals and Roman ruins than you can imagine.
Where will your first, or next, adventure take you?
Preparation is key. For F R E E resources, click HERE.
River of Love: The Camino, it gets in your blood.
Summer Darling is a not so typical American teenager, longing to return to Spain and walk another route of the famed Camino de Santiago, but when Covid hits and locks down the world, Summer’s Camino plans screech to a halt. As Summer waits in frustration, she convinces her cousin Lou to join her when the world does reopen. Problem is Lou’s Mom, Tilly, who seems fixated on making Summer’s life a waking nightmare, and is convinced if they go, the sky will fall and crush Lou underneath.
But the girls are persuasive and in the Fall of 2022 they’re off for Portugal to have the adventure of their lives; until Lou gets seriously injured in an accident with a young bicyclist from the States. That’s when things get complicated. Summer starts to fall for the 20-something bike rider and it turns out Lou isn’t quite who Summer thought she was. Even Lou isn’t who Lou thought she was. And if Lou is to live, Tilly will have to open a vault of secrets she hasn’t accessed for eighteen years.
Camino Child: Things don’t always go as planned.
Fifteen-year-old SUMMER DARLING and her grandmother have left their home in southern California to fly to the rugged coast of northern Spain, following a cryptic note and pages from a forty-year-old travel diary neither knew existed. Grandma Pat is now certain that answers to a family mystery lie along the ancient pilgrimage trail called the Camino de Santiago.
To be honest, Summer isn’t all that interested in the journal. She’s learned the hard way to view family with suspicion and keep outsiders at arm’s length. But Summer will do anything for Grandma Pat, and so she hefts a backpack and sets out for a walk of more than 500 miles.
When tragedy strikes, though, Summer has to make a choice. Can she continue the journey alone, trekking across a country she knows almost nothing about? And will the answers she finds on the journal pages fill the aching, lonely hole in her own heart?
As she explores the sunny beaches of the Camino del Norte and the wide-open spaces of the Camino Francés, Summer will discover friends in the most unexpected places, beauty on the most difficult days, and more than a little “Camino magic.”
Have you already read Camino Child? Do you want more of the story?
Georgia & Patricia, as told by Pat, is where Summer Darling’s (the Camino Child) story began—in 1982.
The Camp, as told by Summer’s mother, Laura, shows a life that Laura needs her daughter to escape—two years before the story of Camino Child begins.
Rustic Reunion, The timeline of this Camino Child holiday story takes place between the novels Camino Child and River of Love.
SHORT STORIES (what I write when not traveling or working on a novel)
Do bartenders always know best?
During a train commute, BRENT, a married suburbanite, found himself captivated by a foul-mouthed African-American woman as she talked, cursed, ranted, and muttered across their cosmopolitan landscape.
Weeks later, while once again waiting at a bar for the correct train, hoping to time a chance encounter, Brent confessed to a bartender, STAN, his irrational attraction to the stunning, blasphemous creature.
Did Brent tell all? Did Stan give worthy advice? Would Brent see the woman again? And what about Brent’s poor wife?
* Twain’s full quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”