The Plan: Rough Draft

For the last week, maps of various regions in the Northeast and Midwest have covered the floor of my apartment like intricate Girl Scout sit-upons after a particularly rambunctious meeting. Now there is a plan, and it follows the Northville-Placid Trail (NPT).


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This track won the bid for several reasons. The region garners rave reviews for its scenery and size. It’s also the right length for my time frame. The current draft of the plan calls for leaving on Tuesday, June 10 and returning to Ithaca sometime around June 30 so that I can spend July 4th on Pewaukee Lake. That gives me three amazing weeks, making me feel rich with good fortune, even if I am an unemployed bum.

Plus, the trailhead is close, 170 miles or just over 3 hours away, assuming I don’t miss a turn in Ephratah or Herkimer or Fink Basin. Google’s directions might as well be a journey through the villages of Dr. Seuss, written in the format of an epic free-verse poem.

By the last stanza, I should be on the south end of Adirondack Park, a conglomeration of wilderness areas interspersed with squares of private land and tiny hamlets that takes up most of northeastern New York State. If you open Google Maps in just-plain-map mode, it’s that big green splotch upstate. In terrain mode, it looks like a rough-textured green scab. These mountains were made differently than the ancient, eroded Appalachians, which take the shape of narrow, curving ridges snaking up and down the Eastern Seaboard and were created by tectonic collisions. The Adirondacks are more of a fat, warty toad than a snake. They are still growing by a couple millimeters a year, being pushed skyward by an ambitious bubble somewhere below the Earth’s surface.

Officially, the NPT begins in the little town of Northville just inside the southern border of the park, but the trail follows the road several miles to Upper Benson before disappearing into the woods, and that’s where I’ll begin. (I feel no need to be an end-to-end purist if it means a day of roadwalking.) The trail wanders 133 miles north, skirting or passing through the villages of Piseco, Blue Mountain Lake, and Long Lake, before finally petering out on the southern outskirts of Lake Placid Village. Along the way are lean-tos or huts like the ones I saw in Shenandoah: three sides, a roof, double-decker sleeping platforms for 6-8 people. Usual amenities include a privy hidden away nearby, a spring or stream for water, a fire ring, and tent sites. Trail maintenance should be noticeable, although the beaver population sounds eager, as they are, to fill the trail with water.

The official NPT guidebook, put out by the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), offers sample 10-day and 15-day itineraries, but it’s frustratingly impossible to determine how much ground I’ll be comfortable with covering on each day. I can compare mileages from previous trips, make sensitive measurements from 1:60,000 topo maps, and even walk the entire length of the trail virtually courtesy of Google Earth’s three-dimensional fly-thorughs. Even high technology can’t tell me how often I’ll loose an hour by mistaking an old logging road for the trail, or whether an impending thunderstorm will persuade me to set up camp early, or whether I’ll have a series of high-energy, keep-going days. I do have a few rest days built in that I can convert to mileage make-up days if need be. What I mean to say is that all proposed schedules come with emphatic disclaimers.

If I spend the first two weeks on the NPT, I can spend the remaining week wandering thought the High Peaks, the crowing glory of Adirondack Park. The High Peaks are a particularly topographically intense area just southeast of Lake Placid containing New York State’s highest mountain, Mt. Marcy (1,629 m/5,344 ft), a member of 46 summits in the area over about 4,000 feet. The spectacular scenery has made it the most popular area of the Adirondacks. A visit is required of every upstate resident, preferably at least once a year. Because of the popularity, the local bears have become wise to the ways of hungry humans and their flimsy bear bags. Bear cans are required here by park regulation.

Food is the limiting factor. If people didn’t have to eat, our packs would weigh nothing and we could roam the wilderness endlessly, besides instantly and conveniently solving world hunger. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case, and so I’m stuck with the logistical challenge of resupplying about every six days and crunching my Ramen into noodle dust in order to fit enough non-perishables in the bear can. One popular resupply method is to mail yourself packages care of local post offices and then making sure you end up in, say, Blue Mountain Lake (pop.: 146) on a non-holiday weekday morning or afternoon, but not when the PO closes for lunch.

The last major roadblock, or rather trailblock, remains transportation. There is no set shuttle service from Lake Placid to Northville. I could take an all-day bus ride to the town of Gloversville on the south edge of Adirondack Park, but I’d still be 20 miles away from my car at 9 p.m. in an unfamiliar town. Walking a giant loop back to Northville would require more time than I have, extensive roadwalks if I want to avoid retracing my steps, and scratching the High Peaks from the schedule.

Assuming transportation works out, here’s the rough draft plan:

Date	Day	Miles	Where to
Tue 10	1	7.1	Ithaca to Upper Benson to Silver Lake Hut
Wed 11	2	10.4	Hamilton Lake Stream Hut
Thu 12	3	10.7	Through Piseco to Fall Stream Camp
Fri 13	4	9.6	West Canada Lakes Huts
Sat 14	5	0.0	Rest Day
Sun 15	6	4.1	Cedar Lakes Huts
Mon 16	7	11.8	Wakely Dam Campsites
Tue 17	8	8.5	Stephens Pond Hut
Wed 18	9	7.9	Past Blue Mountain Lake to Tirrell Pond Hut
Thu 19	10	10.6	Through Long Lake to Catlin Bay Huts
Fri 20	11	5.9	Plumleys Huts
Sat 21	12	7.3	Seward Hut
Sun 22	13	7.0	Duck Hole Huts
Mon 23	14	8.9	Leave NPT for the High Peaks and Scott Clearing Hut
Tue 24	15	0.0	Floating Rest Day
Wed 25	16	9.5	Whispering Pines Campground near Lake Placid
Thu 26	17	???	High Peaks
Fri 27	18	???	High Peaks
Sat 28	19	???	High Peaks
Sun 29	20	???	High Peaks
Mon 30	21	???	Back to civilization, or at least as far as Ithaca

Farewell Party

If I keep my fingers well and truly crossed, and maybe if I do all my chores and finish my brussels sprouts and promise not to stick my tongue out at my sister, there’s a possibility that Home Depot Girl might be able to hang up her orange cape forever. I’ll find out in May whether I have an alternate employer, to start sometime in July-ish (although nothing’s gonna stop me from being on Pewaukee Lake for the Fourth this year).

If this happens, I’d like to give HDG a farewell party. I’m thinking of having the theme be “endangered animals.” I could bring HDG to the middle of some deep, dark woods and release her into the wild, never to be seen again.

This requires taking off the month of June and planning a long-distance tramp. But where to? Which woods or hills would you, gentle reader, visit if you had three weeks to kill? Am I forgetting anything critical, like an appointment I penciled in three years ago for June 15, or the fact that without a timely intervention, I will be tramping pantsless? (Which is true. There’s an inopportune hole in my current pair. I imagine hoards of ticks crawling through and writing to all their friends about how they found a nice, cozy spot in the shade on the banks of an artery, and that they’re thinking of building a tick hotel with maybe an amusement park and guided tours to my ankles.)

Ice Age Trail
St. Croix Falls, WI (just opposite Taylor’s Falls, MN) to Kettle Moraine State Forest to Sturgeon Bay

It was many, many years before my first real tramp, when I naively assumed that a lively day hike was the epitome of outdoors enjoyment, when I was first introduced to the Ice Age Trail. Mom and I would hop on our bikes and spend a day on the Glacial Drumlin Trail for sundaes at LeDuc’s. En route, where the bike trail skirts the north edge of Kettle Moraine State Forest,a wide, inviting path is mown through a grassy field and disappears tantalizingly into the trees. My bike, although willing and loyal on pavement, balked at the wildly uneven ground on the path, so its origin and destination remained intriguingly mysterious. Mom told me once that it was the Ice Age Trail and that it meandered all over the state, from top to bottom and side to side, following the southern extent of the glaciers. If you started walking, you could keep going almost forever. How gripping to a Covault, to whom turning around on a trail is considered an admission of defeat and often requires multiple dire warnings of slow and painful deaths to hikers who proceed. I vowed someday to follow that broad, sunny, seductively welcoming path into the woods, not stopping until I ran out of trail.

It turns out that my imagined trek wouldn’t have been as epic as hoped. At present, according to its website, the IAT looks more like a dotted line than a solid trail. Longish stretches cross state forests (including Kettle Moraine) and jump through state parks, but between these scenic stints are many miles of roadwalks and shortcuts through towns. The trail seems to beg for forgiveness by passing miniscule county and city parks on the way, like a desperate tour guide in a land with no word for “tourist.”

I think my ten-year-old self would forgive me for skipping over the IAT, for now. There are bigger mastodons out there to spear.

North Country Trail
Eastern New York State through the Fingerlakes Trail to Ohio’s Buckeye Trail, up Michigan and across the UP, over Minnesota and ending in the middle of North Dakota

I didn’t realize until a year or two ago that it’s possible to walk home from Ithaca on trails. Within 20 minutes’ drive of Pleasant Grove Road, I can find trail markers bursting proudly with the compass-rose-cum-northstar emblem of the North Country Trail along with a tiny map of the seven states I could cross if only I kept walking. The NCT tries its best to cross half the country, taking advantage of many established trails along the way, but there’s also plenty of roadwalking between public lands. Since I’ve already seen most of the Ithaca-area NCT where it coincides with the Fingerlakes Trail, I was considering jumping ahead to the UP to see what the land of Blackjack looks like in summertime. The NCT wanders through the Porkies and through Ottawa, Hiawatha, and Superior National Forests, finally jumping the Lakes at the Mackinaw Island Bridge. I’m told the bridge is quite impressive. I’ve been there once. My sister and I oohed and ahhed at the pea-soup fog as our severely disappointed parents described the stunning vistas allegedly surrounding us.

Other pluses include a relatively peaceable bear population (as opposed to that of the Adirondacks, which essentially behave like a fat breed of dog and expect to be fed like one) and the perhaps tenuous possibility of pressuring friends and family into chauffeuring me to and from trailheads. There’s topography but not in the extreme, and the Northwoods always seem serenely inviting, even in winter.

On the other hand, it’s hard to tell, without buying the various guidebooks, how much of the NCT is physical trail and how much is either roadwalk or even a dotted line gestating in someone’s imagination. Plus, as long as I’m in the East (and who knows how much longer that will last), I might as well see the Eastern sights while they’re relatively convenient. And it might be easier to cut my long-distance teeth on a more established trail.

Appalachian Trail
Georgia to Maine

This is the obvious choice. It’s solid trail for as long as I have time to hike. Ammenities include huts and latrines and a plethora of information on the quirks and how-tos of each mile.

But I hesitate to step on Andrea’s bootlaces. That’s her and Tony’s quest, later this year. (Happy tramping, sister!)

Long Trail
Crosses Vermont from Maryland to Canada, coinciding with the AT for the southern half

It takes 270 miles and about 30 days to cross Vermont the long way. The Green Mountains, like all mountains in the East, stand in remarkably narrow ridges, leaving little room for multiple north-south trails and therefore little opportunity for loop hikes, requiring creativity for trailhead and trail-end transportation.

Still, mountains tend to make for good scenery, and there are plenty of huts along the way. But there might also be plenty of people, of course.

Northville-Placid Trail
Northville, NY through the Adirondacks to Lake Placid

It borders on criminal negligence to have lived in New York State for as long as I have without having climbed Mt. Marcy in Adirondack Park. (It’s not precisely clear to me what sort of “park” it is. It’s not national, nor state, nor local. It’s just a big green blob on the map, as if an intern at the cartographer’s spilled a glob of green ink and then wrote “Park” on the splotch, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder to make sure that his mentor was still busy in the next room. Due to its ink-drop origin, this area has one particular bonus: it’s round. This opens the possibility of multiple north-south trails, meaning a loop might be made. I’m still researching the reality of this possibility. I haven’t yet found a trail map of the whole park. It’s too big.

But nowhere is perfect. Possibly because of the legions of outdoors enthusiasts who make their Mt. Marcy pilgrimages in summer, hiker-bear relations have been deteriorating recently. At least one clever bear has figured out how to pop open the bear-proof food canisters of the model I took to Shenandoah. Bear canisters are required and must be a park-approved model. And I’m terrified of any bear not behind bars in a zoo. Maybe some bear exposure is exactly what I need to put this fear to rest. But is it worth the price of several days’ worth of food and a chewed-through set of Tupperware-on-steroids?

Anywhere Else?

This weekend I’ll visit EMS and chat with Cornell Outdoor Education, and maybe post to the Cornell Outing Club list for advice. We’ll see. Any suggestions or comments from the audience?

	Solid Trail	Loop	Easy Trailhead Transportation	Low Bear Density	Low People Density
IAT			X	X	X
NCT	?		?	X	X
AT	X		?	?
LT	X			X	?
NPT	X	?	?

Tramping Shenandoah

March 18 - 21, 2008

Let's try something new. Google Maps offers map editing tools into which you can embed text and photos, which sounds to me like a useful storytelling technology. Below is a link to my Tramping Shenandoah map. My route is marked as a blue line, and you can click on icons along the way for photos and explanations. Begin at the blue car in the northeast and follow the blue line south (clockwise) over Buck Ridge.

Enjoy your virtual tramp!

(Alternately, you can see the same blurbs and photos as a blog.)

Read Me: Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins

For writing this book, Jenkins is almost my hero. He managed to turn his occupation into moving to Alaska and having as many adventures as possible in one year, then writing about it. Sign me up! But the book wasn’t really about moving to Alaska as much as it was about Peter Jenkins moving to Alaska. The popularity of his previous books, especially A Walk Across America (1979), enabled him to sell this book idea to his editor. (Side note to Tricia: Well, it looks like a smidgeon of fame isn’t all bad after all...) Granted, he does a good job of letting his interviewees do the speaking and inserting his own humble narrative voice only to give color and perspective. Still, I wouldn’t mind crossing the Lower 48 by foot if I got to write a successful book about it afterward, and then move to Alaska.

I say that Jenkins is almost my hero because the book that I would write after a year in the (original) frozen tundra would be radically different than Looking for Alaska. People fascinate Jenkins. He travels in order to collect relationships, to experience different ways people live, to learn how people cope with and thrive in so many situations. What he likes to remember about a place is that slower-than-necessary drive down that empty road, listening to a local granny recall a lifetime of stories. The very middle of nowhere, an extended snow machine ride off the vehicularly harsh Haul Road, is represented by a surprisingly civilized house and its quiet inhabitants. The far north, near Barrow, means Native whaling expeditions whose leaders read the ice as if it was a Shakespeare sonnet. Jenkins’ Alaska is less the stereotype unpeopled wilderness than a space dotted with villages, in a glass-half-full kind of way. Parts of his book go almost too far, becoming laundry lists of the admittedly interesting characters he meets, as if to prove that people do in fact live there: mountain-man backwoods bachelors dressed perpetually in flannel; strong, gun-toting women; knowledgeable children on whose chores rest the livelihood of their families.

All good reading... although an Alaskan tradition is for Outsiders to move there in order to avoid people, not to seek them out, which is the camp I would join. People like Jenkins can go anywhere on Earth and find interesting people just waiting for someone to ask them to tell their life stories. And when people like Jenkins do so, I’m quite willing to read the resulting books, because I’m unlikely myself to walk into some arctic fishing village and pretend to be interested in the details of someone’s broken marriage (even if it is a broken Alaskan marriage). Instead of experiencing people, I would visit Alaska to experience the land: midnight sun and noontime darkness, unimaginable cold, northern lights, suicidally obedient sled dogs, neighborhood herds of musk oxen, omnipresent bears, tundra, taiga, mountains, a thousand versions of ice, and hiking through as much of it as possible.

(But then, who would read a book whose theme is “isn’t that a pretty mountain?” No one wants to read a book devoid of people. That would be either a natural history textbook or a nature walk pamphlet. Some authors get around it through personification: talking pigs, haughty housecats, dragons that behave like flamboyantly-dressed circus fire-eaters. And why not? We can’t possibly know how a pig really thinks, so authors must necessarily imagine and project people-thoughts into the piggy heads. I barely know what my own self is thinking half the time. As we await scientific consensus regarding the inner lives of African grey parrots and apes using sign language, I’m stuck writing the book All the Neat Scenes Rachel Saw on her Summer Vacation until I learn to dull my distaste of small talk long enough to hone interviewing skills.)

Still, I give Looking for Alaska a thumbs up for accomplishing one of the goals of any book, allowing me as the reader to have vicarious experiences I would not otherwise have—with the added bonus that the interesting parts about bears and kayaking and the Iditarod and near-death experiences aboard various bush planes are all distilled from the dreary small talk and dead-end leads Jenkins had to wade through.

Surprisingly, the book dealt not only with Jenkins’ dealings with his new Alaskan neighbors, it also talked about his relationships with his own family. His wife lived with him in Seward between his frequent road trips. Various other family members made long visits or traveled with him. His college-age daughter, Rebekah, made regular appearances. Jenkins brims with pride for her as he watches her find her place in the world as a writer, just like Dad. He even gives her space in his book to write about her own Alaskan experiences (in prose as pleadingly flowery as the Teleflora delivery truck on Valentine’s Day morning, which is to be expected for a wannabe writer not far out of high school). He also brims with parental advice—not suggestions on helping your kid avoid teen angst or quieting an infant at 3 a.m., but rather advice on coping with your children’s successful coming of age. Jenkins notes Rebekah’s newfound self-confidence, developed during a recent NOLS outing and exercised during various Alaskan exploits. He is proud that she is growing up and becoming independent, but it is inevitably a bittersweet pride for giving up his “little girl” and relinquishing his role as protector. He struggles to tame his parental shielding instinct in order to send Rebekah to a tiny village above the Arctic Circle to live with two guys he knows only from emails and a handful of telephone calls. She can take care of herself now, even alone in the arctic with strange, lonely men.

While reading, I felt a bout of anti-homesickness coming on. Reading reminded me of what it feels like to move far away for a year, that excitement for constant newness and daily opportunities to explore. Everyday tasks become adventures. Planning a trip to the grocery store elicits eager anticipation. If you include navigating public transportation systems, the possibilities for epic expeditions become infinite. By the end, you can say with conviction that you have accomplished something that year. You’ve learned. You’ve been faced with daily challenges, many of them quite bizarre, and survived.

Sure, there’s lots to recommend staying put and becoming deeply familiar with one place, developing a history with a place. And there’s something to be said for the ability to work on long-term relationships instead of continually answering where you’re from and what brings you here. (Wouldn’t it be more efficient to print out that introductory speech on business cards to give out?) There are vast differences between talking to someone who’s known you since birth versus chatting with the insta-friend in the next hostel bunk.

But I’m greedy, I have to see every inch of the planet before I can decide where the ideal spot to settle down is. Or maybe that’s being thorough. All I know is that my brain feels good, as if it got a subcutaneous massage, when its exploration cortex gets exercise.

I had to wonder whether Alaska deserves the top spot on my Ideal Future Home list. I think I’d have to go find out for myself. Anyway, I’m now itching to go somewhere. And writing a best-seller about it wouldn’t be half bad, either.

Read Me: Tales of a Female Nomad, Rita Golden Gelman

An antsy bookstore gift card led me to the travel section one day, where Rita Goldman Gelman’s Tales of a Female Nomad (Three Rivers Press, 2001) caught my eye. It turns out to be a diary of Gelman’s life since her divorce at age 48, when she abandoned a glitzy life among the elite of LA in order to get to know the rest of the world. By smiling often, sampling every food she was offered, and asking everyone she met about their children in a genuinely interested tone, she inserted herself into communities in Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, New Zealand, and Indonesia. Serendipity is her guide. She typically picks an intriguing country almost at random and flies there on the meager profits of her children’s books (which include such colorful titles as More Spaghetti, I Say! and Stop Those Painters!). She then places herself in the remotest backwater village she can reach and chats with locals until someone invites her to stay in their home. She absorbs the local culture and language from her hosts while helping out with chores (preferably in the kitchen) and giving English lessons. When her visa expires, she moves on.

Most of the people she called friends in her old life believe that her divorce severely traumatized her. They accuse her of running away from the situation, making up for her husband’s withdrawal by insisting on being accepted by everyone else she meets. Or of purposefully removing herself from any possibility of long-term relationships by refusing to settle in one place. Gelman responds that she is not running away from anything, and instead she is running toward something. (Funny, that’s the same response I once gave when someone asked me why in the world, as it were, I was going to spend a year in New Zealand. And I thought I was being so smart, turning around his accusation like that.) Is it so crazy to want to be liked and accepted by strangers? Or to be curious and crave challenges? There are worse ways to deal with curves in the road of life. Gelman chose to go off-roading. Her book’s purpose is to explain how positive a nontraditional lifestyle can be. She hopes to be an inspiration, especially to older, divorced women. They still have a lot of living to do, and they might as well spend it on adventures, new friends, and a renewed sense of helpfulness.

At times, though, Gelman makes her life sound impossibly idyllic. She marches into remote corners of the world, making devoted friends out of whole villages on nothing but a smile. Her determined optimism finds ways to tack happy endings onto even the most revolting bad luck. (She succeeds in turning an ugly bout with a whole-body skin infection into a beautiful snake-shedding-skin allegory.) Plus, to make her modest ends meet, she gets to be a writer. She conducts research simply by living. She rarely admits to a wistful thought. But there must be something undesirable about her life. How does she handle so many long-distance relationships, particularly with her parents and children? Does her bank account ever run threateningly low? Does she ever spend five minutes passionately hating children’s books before settling down to finish a story about an exuberantly grinning monkey dressed in a floppy red hat and a gold necklace? How does she plan on living when she’s 90? Does she ever get antsy at the keyboard like I do, itching to go out and collect more neat experiences instead of sequestering herself away to write about the past? Does she ever wish that her life was even a teeny bit different? Her book is an advertisement describing the absence of regret in her nomadic life, a kind of so-there letter to her baffled former friends. But it sometimes sounds as exaggerated as the second half of a drug commercial, after the actress has gulped down her pills and now is running for president. It’s a premeditated strategy for encouraging potential nomads, but if I were seriously considering selling my silverware for a ticket to Borneo, I might want to prepare for the tough parts as well as look forward to the wonderful ones. (Then again, mystery is part of the adventure... Still, the book remains unbalanced.)

If her own life is idyllic, the lives of the people she visits are less satisfying. She prefers the company of indigenous communities whose lives are entwined with tradition. Her hosts are often relatively poor and live in developing countries. Gelman struggles to balance two noble goals: on one hand, wanting to help improve her friends’ lives, and on the other, respecting traditions which are often wonderful but sometimes troublesome. She strives to accept new cultural frames and to see life through the eyes of the locals. When she sees one host family throw their food wrappers to the wind during a roadside picnic, she resists her urge to find a garbage can for her own litter, forcing herself not to judge their actions by the standards of the culture she grew up in. But what would you do if you watched your drunken host beat his wife, knowing that it was “culturally acceptable?” (Acceptable by whom, I wonder?) What would you do if you recognized a great artistic talent in a kid whose destiny it is to wash windows in the family woodcarving gallery? Gelman gave this kid a carving kit, with which he created inspired sculptures, but she stopped short of asking the family to give him time off to develop his talent, fearing that her request would be seen as meddlesome. “Interference” is a slippery concept whose definition slides into that of “helping” without obvious borders, made even more difficult to discern when surrounded by an unfamiliar code of manners and lurking local politics. Fearing that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from “interfering,” she decided it was time to pack up and continue her journeys. She interprets her urge to interfere as a sign that she has been somewhere long enough, that she has settled into her surroundings enough to feel comfortable passing judgments and suggesting changes. (Then again, maybe she just needs an excuse to keep moving, to feed her addiction to newness.)

After a bit of internet research, I see that there is a small but growing community of older, typically divorced, women travelers. How exciting, and reassuring, to discover a new kind of freedom at an age that we whippersnappers associate with dentures and canes. I almost wish I were 60 right now, so that I could join that crowd, confident with the wisdom of years—and the bank account of years. Or at least a promising work-from-“home” business idea. Sigh, I just hope that a long and boring career from which to launch such a business isn’t a prerequisite for world travel. I wonder how Gelman would advise younger women who are making, instead of remaking, their lives?

Gelman does reach her goal of inspiring potential travelers and showing us how easy and rewarding it is to connect with people who seem, at first, so fundamentally different. Granted, near the middle, her narrative turns into a straight-from-the-diary list that could be entitled “Neat things that happened to me this month:” this is what I cooked on that day, then I flew there, here’s how I found a house, these are the people I went to that ceremony with. Passages that emphasize important events and tie them to Gelman’s life-philosophy become shorter and rarer. But despite my few critiques, I’m ready to hop on a one-way flight to the deepest jungle where no one’s ever heard of English. (Don’t worry, friends and parents, I wouldn’t thrive in Gelman’s shoes. First of all, she can have the tropics, give me a good snowfall. Besides, she repeats that her passion is people, whereas mine is landscapes. Her expertise in chit-chatting opens her doors, literally. I, on the other hand, would head for Nowheresville in order to leave it and go hiking nearby, so I guess I’m still searching for a role model. Still, writing books while hiking around Vatnajökull Glacier sounds sorely tempting.) There is, apparently, more than one way to live a successful and rewarding life.

More Info:
www.ritagoldengelman.com

Other Eye-Catching Titles:
Not So Funny When It Happened (ed. Tim Cahill, Travelers’ Tales 2006)
Madam, Have You Ever Really Been Happy? (Meg Noble Peterson, iUniverse 2005)

Currently on my coffee table:
Tales from Nowhere (ed. Don George, Lonely Planet 2006)

Two Thumbs Up:
Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer, Anchor Books 1996)
Southern Exposure (Chris Duff, Falcon 2003)
Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge (Jill Fredston, North Point Press 2001)
A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson, Broadway Books 1998)