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Books > Sport & Leisure > Travel & holiday > Travel writing > General
A journey of 6,518 miles, that filled 14 notebooks and encompassed
all 4 countries of the United Kingdom, travelling through 42 out of
its 95 counties, visiting 23 cities; requiring 75 trains, 60 maps,
26 cars, 16 buses, 9 ferries, 4 tubes, 4 uber taxis, 4 black cabs,
2 DLR, 2 vans, a canal boat, a probation service minibus, an
intercontinental articulated lorry, a 1953 Morris Oxford and a pair
of size 9 boots ... A tumultuous period in British politics left
writer Harry Bucknall questioning whether he really knew the place
he called home. Propelled by a growing desire to better understand
his island nation, Harry decided to undertake a pilgrimage of
sorts; he embarked on a series of four walks across Britain that
would mirror the changing seasons, covering a distance of nearly
1,600 miles. From fresh and heady spring through to the gloriously
crisp winter months, Harry journeyed across Britain visiting
cities, towns and vast swathes of the countryside from Mull to
Sunderland and Aberystwyth to Lowestoft, meeting a host of diverse
and charismatic characters along the way as he strove to uncover
the beating heart of the nation. Uplifting, joyous and charming, A
Road for All Seasons is a vivid, social and cultural snapshot of
21st-century Britain. Focusing as much on the beauty of the fertile
land as the people who inhabit it, it explores a unique culture,
its folklore both past and present, as well as the wealth of the
nation's history and heritage. Exquisitely written and filled with
delightful people and places, this is Harry's ardent tribute to the
British Isles.
In this thoughtful, informative account of a journey from Ho Chi
Minh City and the Mekong Delta to Hanoi and Halong Bay, Zoe
Schramm-Evans delves behind the cliche-ridden images of Vietnam to
discover a country poised on the brink of remarkable social and
economic change.
The islands of the Outer Hebrides are home to some of the most
remote and spectacular scenery in the world. They host an
astonishing range of mysterious structures - stone circles, beehive
dwellings, holy wells and 'temples' from the Celtic era. Over a
twelve-day pilgrimage, often in appalling conditions, Alastair
McIntosh returns to the islands of his childhood and explores the
meaning of these places. Traversing moors and mountains, struggling
through torrential rivers, he walks from the most southerly tip of
Harris to the northerly Butt of Lewis. The book is a walk through
space and time, across a physical landscape and into a spiritual
one. As he battled with his own ability to endure some of the
toughest terrain in Britain, he met with the healing power of the
land and its communities. This is a moving book, a powerful
reflection not simply of this extraordinary place and its people
met along the way, but of imaginative hope for humankind.
In Alycia Pirmohamed's debut collection, Another Way to Split
Water, a woman's body expands and contracts across the page, fog
uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms
cascades into metaphors of longing and separation just as often as
it signals inheritance, revival, and recuperation. Language unfolds
into unforgettable and arresting imagery, offering a map toward
self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place. These poems are
a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory reforms and
transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold,
imagined and reimagined. It is a meditation on womanhood,
belonging, faith, intimacy, and the natural world. 'Pirmohamed is
an immensely gifted poet' - Eduardo C. Corral 'An electric, taut,
and glimmering achievement' - Aria Aber
The Pony Express has a hold on the American imagination wildly out
of proportion to its actual contribution to the history and
development of the West. It lasted less than eighteen
months—about the amount of time it took author Scott Alumbaugh to
plan and ride the route—and utterly failed by every measure of
success attributed to it. The only reason it did not fade out of
public consciousness, as did the far more successful Butterfield
mail, is publicity. In the Pony’s case, a thirty-year campaign of
publicity mounted by Buffalo Bill Cody, who mislead the public by
claiming to have been a Pony Express rider, and lied outright by
claiming to have made the longest Pony Express run. More than
anyone, Buffalo Bill kept the legend alive by including a Pony
Express segment throughout the run of his Wild West show. But while
the Pony Express may be among the least significant developments of
its era, it is the most iconic. One can’t really understand the
Pony Express—what it stood for, what it accomplished, why it came
about at all—without understanding the far more interesting
historical milieu from which it grew: Three wars (Mexican, Utah,
and Paiute); two gold rushes (California and Pike’s Peak); the
overland emigration of hundreds of thousands to Oregon and
California; the exodus of tens of thousands of Mormons to Utah. On
the Pony Express Trail: One Man's Bikepacking Journey to Discover
History from a Different Kind of Saddle recounts the author’s
experience bikepacking the Pony Express Trail over five weeks
during June and July 2021, and uses the trail as a prism through
which to survey a wide spectrum of mid-1800s historical events.
Sixty-two-year-old Alumbaugh rode the Pony Express Bikepacking
Route from St. Joseph, MO to Salt Lake City, UT, over 1,400 miles,
mostly off-road, sometimes through very remote territory. The
narrative follows his day-to-day experiences and impressions: the
challenges, the sites he visited, the country he rode through, and
interactions with the people he met.
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