Wild Life: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman: 2

Foreward Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Gold Winner for Travel. Winner 1st place for best travel memoir at the 2014 North American Book Awards. Also winner of the silver Solas Awards for Best Travel Story of the Year 2014.From licking a Monet in Paris to pushing an abusive macho honeymooner off his sailboat in the shark-infested Galápagos to saving her toddler son from a charging bull elephant in Africa these delightful tales will inspire readers to follow the call of a wild life and leave home with their doors unlocked.When youre hitchhiking about in foreign lands whether in France Morocco or perhaps New Zealand it helps-as California-girl Lisa Alpine discovered-to be young blond persistent and female. And to get along once youve reached an approximate destination in hardscrabble exotica you should be friendly fearless and sometimes counter intuitively trusting. There is daring humor and even a bit of Eros in the fourteen stories that span her life from the innocence of eighteen when she was struck with wanderlust into middle age. I am a woman who wanders and wonders and writes she explains. And what wandering theres been beginning in Paris where she tasted art by licking a Monet. In Vienna she asked an old woman who turned out to be a survivor of Auschwitz where she might find cheap lodging and ended up as the womans house guest. She met the chauffeur of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones in Switzerland and was offered a job babysitting Richardss two children but after witnessing a temper tantrum by Richardss live-in girlfriend declined and took a job as a bartender offering free drinks in order to get her slave-driving boss who held her passport as ransom to fire her. She had the sort of inevitable adventure that tests us all coping with her mothers dementia before her death on Mothers Day 2011. In a bittersweet way it was probably her most admirable adventure of all. - Foreword ReviewsLisas love of travel and her fierce determination to push all boundaries takes the reader with her on a thoughtful fun and fearless journey. Lisa opens herself and the reader to the world and explores with courage the physical world around her and the philosophical world within. - Maureen Wheeler founder Lonely PlanetI never tire of talking to Lisa Alpine about her exploits adventures and fascinating life. She has carved a path that is an inspiration to any free-spirited or secretly free-spirited woman. - Constance Hale author of Vex Hex Smash Smooch and Sin and SyntaxLisa Alpines winning title tells much about her personal timeline and the bestiary of good bad ugly or rare characters encountered in these sometimes breathless pages. - David Downie author of Paris to the PyreneesLisas stories are not only packed with the humor and adventure that comes from being a solo woman traveler but also filled with compassion that cuts to the core of what travel is all about-a deep connection to a people and place found when we shed our protective armor and remember we are all human. - Kimberley Lovato author of Walnut Wine and Truffle Groves