I don’t feel like I’ve had a day off unless I get out in the sun and do something. Sometimes I almost work harder on my days off - skiing, hiking, biking, gardening - than I do on workdays, when I spend most of the day sitting at a keyboard. Playing outside relaxes me, even more than meditation or yoga - talk about hard work!

Playing outside relaxes me, even more than meditation or yoga - talk about hard work!

In spring, I garden, and in summer, I hike. Both are simple ways to honor the adventurer in me, in between big-ticket challenges. On those spring days when the garden doesn’t need me, I do easy hikes, to ramp up to my summer push into the high country. Early in the season, I’m still a bit lazy, not yet ready to rise at dawn to reach the top of a mountain before afternoon storms turn me into a small but effective lightning rod. So, in May, I tend to keep my hikes close to town and no-brainer.

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My mother didn’t raise me, my father’s mother did. He called her Mom, so I thought that was her name. Grampa bought me Dr. Seuss books, but Mom taught me to read them. One of my earliest memories is reading to her, “Hand, hand, fingers, thumb. Dum ditty, Dum ditty, Dum dum dum.” My love of books is forever entwined with the comfort of Mom’s lap.

Grampa bought me Dr. Seuss books, but it was Mom who taught me to read them.

Mom used to take me with her to the bowling alley. I still have a scar from a massive splinter that pierced my knee while I crawled on the wooden benches. When I was eight, I begged her to teach me to play. I bowled competitively until I was 16, but never became as good as Mom. My high game was 216, hers was 278 - she rolled that one in her early 70s. She doesn’t bowl anymore, but she didn’t quit until arthritis stopped her when she was about 79.

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I am not a poet. This is not humility, false or otherwise, nor is it an excuse, but a simple fact. Yet I appreciate poetry, and every now and then I feel compelled to write a poem, though I have no real idea how. Yesterday I went to a gathering of poets at the Denver Woman’s Press Club and listened to several club members and audience members share their lyrical thoughts. Here’s what I took with me when I left:

A Balloon in My Car

Where are the nametags and the tea and the ice?
I don’t know poetry, but I know how to reach and boil and tumble the cubes.
After the reading, a balloon in my car nods in approval.

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On every journey, I pick new things up and leave old things behind: belongings, attitudes, friendships. I love Alaska so much that it wasn’t until after my talk in Bellingham, Washington that I realized something had dislodged inside me on my last visit to the Last Frontier.

I had fun talking with the small but enthusiastic group at Village Books.

I had fun talking with the small but enthusiastic group at Village Books, yet my insides felt chaotic. I wondered why. Part of it was due to something I normally wouldn’t talk about here, but then, I suppose this is the perfect place to talk about it…

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If I were a visual artist, I’d draw my book tour for you in a series of sketches: half-finished lines and curves full of electric highs and exhausted lows, the faces of old friends softened by nostalgia, the faces of new friends clarified by discovery.

My friend Angie and I became rock ‘n roll groupies for Lukas Nelson & The Promise of the Real.

Thursday night in Seattle, my friend Angie and I became rock ‘n roll groupies for Lukas Nelson & The Promise of the Real. Off my itinerary, I was headbanging and swaying like a smitten teenager, as Lukas and his band tore up The Showbox.

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This story ends at the Seattle talk show New Day Northwest, where I appeared right after musician Lukas Nelson, son of Willie Nelson, and a unique talent in his own right. I’d never heard him before and I was impressed:

Lukas Nelson is the son of Willie Nelson, and a unique talent in his own right.

How did I get here?

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I’m not doing this right. Every time I travel, that thought occurs to me at some point. I woke up yesterday morning at 7:30, and was ready to go by 9:00, which made me feel so grownup and responsible. Then I remembered I hadn’t yet checked the driving directions from Cheyenne, at the southern end of Wyoming, to Lovell, at the northern end. I regretted my lack of a GPS or smart phone — though I don’t know how I would have swung that, when I had neither enough cash nor credit for this trip until a couple of days before it started. Ah, panic: sometimes I rationalize that this is what adventure is made of.

It was a gorgeous second day of spring, but wow, I’d forgotten how windy Wyoming is!

I copied the directions off Google Maps, then decided to call the Fort Causeway Hostel for specifics, because I might arrive there at dusk. I thought I had the phone number, but I didn’t. So I checked the website, but the number wasn’t listed. Odd. I thought I made my reservation by phone – how did I do that? I gave up, and hoped to arrive before dusk. So, I left at 9:30. No problem. Google said the drive would take about six hours, 45 minutes. I had budgeted eight, including a lunch break, gas breaks, and a few stops for photos. Plenty of time.

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The day is finally here, the first day of my four-week book tour, and as usual, despite my careful planning and preparation, I’m still running around at the last minute: paying that last bill, printing up those workshop handouts, changing my mind about today’s reading, oh, and breakfast… did I buy gas? Yet I’m happy, excited about going on another shoestring journey to celebrate the book about my shoestring journey: They Only Eat Their Husbands: A Memoir of Alaskan Love, World Travel, and the Power of Running Away. This time, I’m married, but I’m kindly leaving the husband at home - taking him on this whirlwind tour might actually devour him, and in my opinion that would be bad manners.

In about an hour, I’m jumping in my car and heading to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I’m speaking at the Laramie County Library at 2:00 this afternoon. Get this: parents can send their kids to the Storytime Room for Ice Cream Sunday, then sneak over to the Cottonwood Room to hear me read about how I ended up in a love triangle with two alcoholics in Alaska, and then ran away to trek around the world alone. I even have pictures: of my world tour, not the love triangle… sorry.

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I’ve just finished teaching a Lighthouse Young Writers Workshop at a Denver middle school, and after just eight-weeks I’m already an addict. I’ve discovered that there is as much joy in helping others find their writing voice as there is in expressing my own. Yet I’ll confess that I used to fear middle-schoolers. “They’re all volition, and no control,” I’ve sometimes explained to friends.

There is as much joy in helping others find their writing voice as there is in expressing my own.

I remember middle school as perhaps the most terrifying time in my life: on my first day, a girl I’d never met tossed the contents of my purse around the gym, she laughed at the Kleenex my mom had stuffed inside, as my other personal odds and ends flew overhead from hand to hand. I wondered what power she had, and I lacked, that made a roomful of strangers decide to humiliate me.

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Like many inveterate wanderers, I’ve done my share of couch surfing. But never until now have I asked complete strangers if I can spend the night on their couch. Like many new authors, I have a marketing budget of zero. But how could a traveler sell an adventure memoir and not take her book on tour? I knew I had to hit the road, and the only way I could afford that was to plan a route that would rely mostly on staying in hostels or in the homes of friends and family. A shoestring book tour seemed fitting, since They Only Eat Their Husbands: A Memoir of Alaskan Love, World Travel, and the Power of Running Away is largely about my shoestring trek around the world.  

I underestimated how far I’d have to take that idea.

A shoestring tour seemed fitting, since They Only Eat Their Husbands is largely about a shoestring trek around the world.

I won’t receive the first revenue from book sales until May. Yet I’m going on my tour from March 20 to April 16, right when I’m approaching the limits of my credit. I believe in the power of networking, so I’m not shy about sharing my goals with supportive friends—and it was one of them who suggested, “You should check out the couch surfing website.”

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