Around-the-World Adventures

Looking for behind-the-scenes insights into my recent eight-month around-the-world travels? I'm currently working on the book, and will post travel articles here as they get published.

For a quick overview of my most recent trip, see travel highlights. (download the pdf version)

You can also read travel articles published in Adventurous Life, my free monthly e-mail newsletter. Other travel articles and stories can be found in the travel resources section of my web site.

Taking a break at one of the world's highest lakes:
Tilicho Lake in Nepal's Annapurna region.

The beginning...

"I was sitting in the Turrialba bus station in San Jose, Costa Rica before I quite realized the trip had started: my around-the-world adventure was barreling headlong out of the starting gate, and I was along for the ride.

"Outside, gray skies hovered above a row of satellite dishes set atop corrugated tin barriers that stood rusting between brick buildings coated with flaking whitewash. I was waiting for the four p.m. direct bus service to Turrialba. Seated on a wooden bench perched with five others like it on a large and crowded cement platform, I watched bus drivers perform miraculous feats of parking side by side in the narrow entryway. Taxis pulled up, red and hurried, to disgorge more people with large plastic bags for luggage..."

Be part of the action!

Read excerpts from the e-mails I sent home along the way.

Plan your own trip with inspiration from my resources section,
or bring me to town to present my around-the-world stories & slideshow.

Browsing the World by Bicycle

After college on the east coast, my best friend and I threw our camping gear in the back of her soft-top jeep, and spent a few months discovering the U.S. on our way to Seattle. I then joined the "real world" for a few years and began a promising career in corporate communications. But one fateful morning, I awoke with the crazy idea that I could ride my bicycle back across the U.S. The next thing I knew, I had sold or given away everything I owned and was pedaling my overloaded bike (which I had learned to fix, but barely ridden) down the Pacific Coast...

Five months and over 3500 miles later, my bike and I got on a plane for Germany, where I lived for three months with the family of a friend I'd met along the way. We biked in Bavaria and along the Danube in Austria, and I later returned to the Pacific Northwest to pedal through the San Juans and Olympic Peninsula.

Adventure Corner

I'm an active whitewater kayaker - river running and steep creeks, especially, although I'm learning to playboat and quite enjoy it. My husband and I spend most winter weekends ice climbing all over New England, along with winter camping and mountaineering. We've climbed mountains ranging from 13,000 to 19,347 feet in Ecuador and Nepal, recently returned from a mountaineering and ice climbing trip to Katahdin (Baxter State Park in Maine), and hope to get out to Mt Rainier soon. Our eventual goal? Denali. But don't tell my father!

Learn more about my various interests and activities...