The 'Neverland Valley-Welcome" sign depicts a little boy, bending over to talk to a troll. Opera wafted on the air. Bronze statues of boys and girls dotted the gardens and falls, and an ornate gazebo offered a shady spot to enjoy the stunning tableau. Two trains carried visitors about. Five pink flamingos on an island in the stream coolly eyed onlookers. Unescorted pre-teen boys scampered everywhere.

"Peter Pan" was playing at the packed, eighty-seat, seven-thousand-square-foot theatre. Popcorn and drinks were dished up gratis to mobs at the concession stand in the entry. On the screen, Captain Hook had ten wide-eyed children bound and gagged, about to be fed to the crocodile. Nearby, amid the rides, two sound stages stood ready to rock. A band was taking a break. "Beat It" was thumping loudly from hidden speakers. A circus-like tent houses the bumper cars, where jubilant lads, faces flushed with excitement, rammed each other's cars with enthusiasm.

I freely admitted, there was no doubt that allegations of child molestation had hurt Jackson in this community. Where wouldn't such charges resonate? Sodom and Gomorrah?

Education expert Raphael Wilkins, author of Accidental Traveller, recounts his travels around the world as a visiting expert, where he set up and advised on several educational projects, all very different from each other, and all providing challenges in working across languages and cultures. He battles with unenthusiastic school principals in Dammam, a volatile project manager in Mexico and awkward hosts in Lucknow. Among other adventures, he visits a navy school in Karachi, completes a fulfilling project in Jeddah, secures a valuable contract with the Colombian government in Bogota, and enjoys a tender reunion in Cyprus. Combining informative and thought-provoking insights on education with personal reflections from a lifetime of travel, An Educational Journey is an inspirational book about the importance of broadening horizons, both physical and personal.

Virginia Thorndike, Maine's own version of Studs Terkel, traveled to all the Maine coast islands that still maintain a year-round population and persuaded the islanders to talk openly about their lives. The result is a compulsively readable, unvarnished, and appealing portrait, much of it in the islanders? own words. The 15 islands not accessible by bridge that still have year-round populations are: Isle au Haut, Islesboro, the Cranberry Isles (near Mt. Desert Island), Eagle Island, Long Island (Frenchboro), Long Island (Casco Bay), Matinicus, Monhegan, North Haven, Swans Island, Vinalhaven, Peaks, Chebeague, Great Diamond, and Cliff.

Over the past several years, "the American in Tuscany" has become a literary subgenre. Launched by the phenomenal success of Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, bookstores now burgeon with nimble, witty accounts of this clash in cultures-Americans trying to do American things in Italy and bumping against a brick wall of tradition. Before this subgenre exhausts itself, it's only fair that we hear the other side of the story-that of a native Tuscan and of dozens of Americans who have stormed through his life and homeland, determined to find in it whatever they are looking for, whether quaintness or wisdom, submission or direction. There is no one better to provide this view than Dario Castagno. A Tuscan guide whose client base is predominantly American, Dario has spent more than a decade taking individuals and small groups on customized tours through the Chianti region of Tuscany. Reared in Britain through early childhood, he speaks English fluently and is therefore capable of fully engaging his American clients and getting to know them. Too Much Tuscan Sun is Dario's account of some of his more remarkable customers, from the obsessive and the oblivious to the downright lunatic. It is also a primer on Tuscany--its charms and its culture. Structured around a typical Tuscan year, Dario takes us through the sights, smells, and sounds of Chianti during each of the twelve months, including the festivities and pageantry that accord with the season, most notable the Palio-the bareback horse race that consumes the social energies of the people of Siena for all of July and August. Dario also intersperses an account of his own life and times-that of a transplanted British "little lord" who learns to love the wilds of Chianti; of his discovery and adoption of abandoned peasant farmhouses; of his apprenticeship in the wine industry; and of his arduous transformation from bohemian layabout to thriving Tuscan guide. But the bulk of the book is devoted, with humor and affection, to the Americans he has met-the vain, the silly, the ignorant, the ambitious, the horny, the condescending, the charming, and the outright pathological. Some of them have made his life hell and live in his nightmares; others became lifelong friends.

Whether he's looking for wild orangutans on Borneo or diving off the coast of South Africa, Randy Wayne White is one of America's most adventurous travelers. In Last Flight Out, White challenges and charms us with tales of his excursions into the dangerous, into the ludicrous, and - especially - into the heart of humanity.
Randy White is a "mover" and has no time for people who can't keep up. Join him as he dives in the infamous lake called the Bad Blue Hole on the desolate Cat Island in the Bahamas. Search for the perfect hot pepper in Colombia, and closer to home; go raccoon hunting in Pioneer, Ohio, where the hunted almost always outsmart the hunters. Get in the ring with Shine Forbes, an eighty-year-old fighter in prime condition and Ernest Hemingway's former sparring partner, and go on a secret mission to steal back General Manuel Noriega's bar stools. Though he rarely finds what he's looking for - such as the half-human, half-alligator creature known as "Gatorman" - he cultivates his unique ability to revel in the unique and comical situations of each exotic trip.
From a jungle survival school in Panama to a week at a professional wrestler's training camp, White leaves the reader mesmerized by the potential of undiscovered places and the promise of endless adventure in unfamiliar territory. An icon of the new breed of thick-skinned, high endurance travelers, Randy White is the real deal.

For more than ten years, Elizabeth Peavey has been traveling around the state of Maine, and writing about her wide-ranging experiences and discoveries in Down East magazine. This book collects her very best columns and essays. In a light and entertaining style laced with lots of entertaining humor, she weaves a wide-ranging tapestry that will give readers a vivid and fresh view of the state.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of the "Home Tour," with travelers drawn to Scotland, the less explored regions of England and North Wales, and, increasingly, to Ireland. Although an integral part of the United Kingdom from 1800, Ireland represented for many travellers a worryingly unknown entity, politically intractable and unstable, devoutly Catholic, and economically deprived. This book examines British responses to the "Sister Isle" throughout a period of significant cultural and historical change, and examines the varied means through which Ireland was represented for a predominantly British audience.

Over the course of twenty years of delivering sailboats to far-flung quaysides, John Kretschmer has had innumerable adventures, both humorous and terrifying. in Flirting with Mermaids, he recounts the most memorable of them. He crosses the Western Caribbean with a crew of eccentric Swedes researching ancient Mayan mariners, lands in Aden at the outbreak of civil war, and endures a North Atlantic crossing during which he disocvers the existence of Force 13 winds. Approaching Japan at the end of a particularly trying delivery, he finds himself sailing in "a high impact debris zone," but his resolve is unshaken. "If a piece of rocketship jetsam fell out of the sky and sank [me] after encounters with Hurricane Floyd, General Noriega,a tsunami, an erupting volcano, and Typhoon Roy, then it was meant to be."

What types of holidays do Japanese people celebrate? What is the educational system like in Japan? What are Japanese festivals like? What are some of the customs and traditions of the Japanese people? Professor Todd Jay Leonard, writing from the perspective of living and working in Japan, provides in this fascinating book the answers to these and many other questions. Letters Home: Musings of an American Expatriate Living in Japan delivers a firsthand account of daily Japanese life through the eyes and personal experiences of Professor Leonard who has enjoyed an ongoing relationship with Japan and the Japanese people for nearly twenty-five years. This anecdotal book of essays, written in the style of personal letters, offers commentary on a wide range of topics and issues including culture, history, education, language, society, and religion of modern Japan from the point-of-view of an American expatriate who has made Japan his home. The author's friendly, down-to-earth, yet authoritative, style of writing will transport you to modern Japan, where you will learn about the customs and traditions of this most fascinating country. Japan and its people.

Peter Mayne (1908-1979) is to Morocco what Peter Mayle is to Provence or Lawrence Durrell to Greece. This 1953 classic in a new edition captures the very essence of the people and place. Having already learned to appreciate Muslim life when he was in Pakistan, Mayne bought a house in the labyrinthine back streets of Marrakesh. He wanted to settle there, not as a privileged visitor in a hotel or grand villa, but as one of the inhabitants. He learned their language, made friends, took part in their festivals, and wrote their letters. This is not a travel book in the accepted sense of the word - it is a record of personal experience in a region of foreign life well beyond the tourist's eye. Mayne contrives in a deceptively simple prose to disseminate in the air of an English November the spicy odors of North Africa; he has turned, for an hour, smog to shimmering sunlight, woven a texture of extraordinary charm.

With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. The physical distance is 1,000 miles of difficult-and often treacherous-water, which Raban navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat.

But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers-- between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class. Along the way, Raban offers captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss.

"God bless the United States and God bless New York City" proclaimed a sign as the bus rolled through a small Indiana town. In October 2001, author Bill Markley was traveling by public bus from Pierre, South Dakota, to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, for a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity celebration. The day Markley left South Dakota began simply enough, but soon tragedy unfolded when a deranged man of Croatian descent slit the throat of a Greyhound bus driver causing an accident and throwing the nation's bus system into disarray. "American Pilgrim" is an honest account of life on the bus, the characters on the bus, bus culture, and the mood of the American people-reflective, patriotic, and upbeat.In those challenging days after the attacks on 9/11, everyone struggled to make sense of the world; as Markley worked on this story; it grew beyond the story of a simple 3,000-mile bus trip. He recalls many of his life's detours, recounting past events at locations the bus traveled through and people associated with those locations-a rambling personal history of people, places, and things. The trip took on new meaning and became a spiritual journey into the country's past and Markley's past.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume III sees him recording more information on Venezuela, visiting Cuba where he also writes about local politics and speaks out fervently against the slave trade; he then sails for Colombia. The volume ends with a comprehensive geognostic description of the northern part of South America.

Jon McConal, longtime columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, takes readers on a trip back through 20 years of writing about Texasits history, people, and unusual places. The native Texan writes about a wide variety of subjects including ghosts, cemetaries, celebrations, pets, veterans, and personal stories.

This adventure story is also the biography of Heinrich Harrer, already a famous mountaineer and Olympic ski champion when he was caught by the outbreak of the World War II while climbing in the Himalayas.;Being an Austrian he was interned in India but succeeded in escaping into Tibet. After a series of experiences in a country never before crossed by a Westerner he reached the forbidden city of Lhasa. He stayed there for seven years, learned the language and acquired an understanding of Tibet and the Tibetans.;He became the friend and tutor of the young Dalai Lama and finally accompanied him into India when he was put to flight by the Red Chinese invasion.;As a mountaineer Heinrich Harrer was a member of the party which successfully ascended the North Wall of the Eiger in 1938.

The subzero temperatures were only one of the dangers explorer Frederick Cook (1865-1940) faced in his attempts to reach the North Pole. During his extraordinary and harrowing journey, he fought off arctic wolves and polar bears, lived through ice storms, almost starved on several occasions, and faced long and lonely hours of isolation. His book relates how he learned from Eskimos how to survive in the Arctic, hunting musk ox to survive, harpooning walruses, and traveling by dog sled. After his journey, he defended himself against the charges of fellow explorer Robert Peary, who claimed that Cook had lied about reaching the Pole. My Attainment of the Pole is not only a great read for any armchair explorer, it is also a controversial work that contributed to a dispute that lasted for decades.

'I am already planning the next adventure. The wanderlust that infected me has no cure.' It all started in Fishguard in the mid-1970s when, aged fifteen, Martyn Howe and a friend set off on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path armed with big rucksacks, borrowed boots, a Primus stove and a pint of paraffin, and a thirst for adventure. After repeating the route almost thirty years later, Martyn was inspired to walk every National Trail in England and Wales, plus the four Long-Distance Routes (now among the Great Trails) in Scotland. His 3,000-mile journey included treks along the South West Coast Path, the Pennine Way, the Cotswold Way and the West Highland Way. He finally achieved his ambition in 2016 when he arrived in Cromer in Norfolk, only to set a new goal of walking the England and Wales Coast Paths and the Scottish National Trail. In Tales from the Big Trails, Martyn vividly describes the diverse landscapes, wildlife, culture and heritage he encounters around the British Isles, and the physical and mental health benefits he derives from walking. He also celebrates the people who enrich his travels, including fellow long-distance hikers, tourists discovering Britain's charm, farmers working the land, and the friendly and eccentric owners of hostels, campsites and B&Bs. And when he is asked 'Why do you do it?', the answer is as simple as placing one foot in front of the other: 'It makes me happy.'

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume II covers the period in which he undertake a major exploration of the River Orinoco, as far as the borders of Brazil, finishing in Angostura, then the capital of Spanish Guiana.

In these collected stories, Long explores watery, secluded jungle caves in South America, tackles remote thawing iceflows on Baffin Island, and solos cutting-edge rock climbs over a desert hungry for his failure.

This book concerns the significance of the English Channel in British and French literature from the 1780s onwards: a timely subject given the intense debates in progress about the actual and desired relationships between Britain and mainland Europe. The book addresses contemporary authors who use the Channel as a focus for cultural comment, comparing their approaches to those of earlier writers, from Charlotte Smith and Chateaubriand through Hugo and Dickens to historians and travel writers of the 1950s and 1980s.