Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Travel & Tourism

Jeff Alt takes you along every step of his 2,160-mile Appalachian Trail adventure. This entertaining journey includes bears, bugs, blisters, captivating characters, skunk bedmates, and hilarious food cravings. Alt walked more than five million steps in tribute to his brother, who has cerebral palsy and lives in a home called Sunshine. This trail adventure has inspired an annual event that has raised more than $200,000 for Sunshine. It includes hiking tips for the whole family.

Somewhere in Arizona’s Chocolate Mountains lie the Big Maria Mine and a wealth of gold lost for 100 years. There’s only one problem: Those mountains are now the home of the US Army Proving Ground, the world’s largest active artillery range. But for Harry, Ricky, and Frank, three down-at-the-heels guys with few dollars but plenty of dreams, the gold offers each of them a chance for a new life. Are scuba diving through an underwater ghost town; facing down a hungry mountain lion; doing the hesitation waltz across a minefield; matching wits with potheads, pit bulls, and bikers; and braving the might of Uncle Sam’s full arsenal worth it?

Discover Venice through the vibrant and personal observations of Gore Vidal. Listen as he walks the storied streets, recounting the city’s rich history and exploring his own family ties to the area. Filled with insightful impressions of Venice’s culture, fine art, and architecture, this audiobook is an unforgettable adventure by one of America’s most significant writers.

Selected letters capturing ongoing conversations between famed mythologist Joseph Campbell and a remarkable group of artists, seekers, filmmakers, novelists, and scholars.

Egan leads us on an unconventional, freewheeling tour: from America's oldest continuously inhabited community, the Ancoma Pueblo in New Mexico, to the high kitsch of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where London Bridge has been painstakingly rebuilt stone by stone; from the fragile beauty of Idaho's Bitterroot Range to the gross excess of Las Vegas, a city built as though in defiance of its arid environment.

Most people don’t expect wood to flavor their food beyond the barbecue, if at all, and gastronomists rarely discuss the significance that wood has on ultimate taste. But trees and wood have a far greater influence over our plate and palate than you might think. A world trip brimming with fascinating encounters, unexpected turns, beautiful landscapes, scientific discoveries, and historic connections, The Flavor of Wood is the story of a passionate flavor hunter, and offers listeners unparalleled access to some of the world’s highest quality cuisine and unknown tree flavors.

This is Cuba is a true story that begins in the summer of 2009 when a young American photo-journalist is offered the chance of a lifetime - a two-year assignment in Havana. For David Ariosto, the island is an intriguing new world, unmoored from the one he left behind. From neighboring military coups, suspected honey traps, salty spooks, and desperate migrants to dissidents, doctors, and Havana’s empty shelves, Ariosto uncovers the island’s subtle absurdities, its Cold War mystique, and the hopes of a people in the throes of transition.

A bracing memoir about self-discovery, liberating escape, and moving forward across an adventurous and volatile American landscape. One year. One national park at a time.

Before Georgetown physics professor Francis Slakey decided to climb the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean, he had shut himself off from other people. His lectures were mechanical; his relationships were little more than ways to fill the evenings. But as his journey veered dangerously off course, everything began to change. A gripping adventure of the body and mind, To the Last Breath depicts the quest that leads Slakey around the globe, almost takes his life, and opens his heart.

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

With exclusive insider status as Nikita Khrushchev’s great grand-daughter, and an ex-pat living and reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since 1993, Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler offer a poignant exploration of the largest country on Earth through their recreation of Vladimir Putin’s fabled New Year’s Eve speech planned across all 11 time zones.

An Experience Definitely Worth Allegedly Having is a collection of essays on travel selected by Edith Zimmerman, the founder of the colorfully offbeat women’s website The Hairpin. Like The Hairpin, these essays are funny, weird, adventurous, and moving. There are stories about following a mysterious stranger’s maps in Mexico, attending endless step aerobics classes in Buenos Aires, faking a terrible British accent in London, and navigating a nude spa in Stockholm. About loneliness, connection, and sunburn.

On September 1, 2004, three middle-aged buddies set out on one of the last geographic challenges never before attempted in North America: to hike the Comb Ridge in one continuous push. The Comb is an upthrust ridge of sandstone-virtually a mini-mountain range-that stretches almost unbroken for a hundred miles from just east of Kayenta, Arizona, to some ten miles west of Blanding, Utah. To hike the Comb is to run a gauntlet of up-and-down severities, with the precipice lurking on one hand, the fiendishly convoluted bedrock slab on the other-always at a sideways, ankle-wrenching pitch.

Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them.

In 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman led a throbbing, hooting, violent river of 62,000 soldiers through the heart of the American South, looting, pillaging, trailing plunder, stealing animals, and dazing civilians. More than a hundred years later, Jerry Ellis, inveterate traveler, storyteller, and adventurer, set off to walk from Atlanta to Savannah using Sherman's route as his guide.

Many fantasize about dramatically changing their lives - living in accordance with their ideals rather than the exigencies of job, bills, and possessions. William Powers actually does it. Here, his family, with baby in tow, searches for balance, community, and happiness in a small town in Bolivia. They build an adobe house, plant a prolific orchard and organic garden, and weave their life into a community of permaculturists, bio-builders, artists, and creative businesspeople. Can this Transition Town succeed in the face of encroaching North American capitalism?