GoNomad has a new article up that features ten books about travel by women. Some great suggestions here from author Kelly Westhoff, including a few mentioned previously on WR.

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One of the books she reviews is Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals – Adventures in Love and Danger by Wendy Dale, which I finished reading earlier this week. It was not exactly what I expected, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised and actually became so captivated by her escapade that I took an extra long lunch hour on Tuesday just so I could finish it up.

This book gives new meaning to the definition of a dedicated long distant relationship, and serves as a handy how-to for dating imprisoned criminals in Costa Rica. Dale describes her version of the good, bad, ugly and downright nasty of living abroad in Central and South America, and still I want to go visit now! She keeps you laughing as her tale becomes unimaginable at times, and manages to share insightful lessons along the way, like this one, while cutting paper snowflakes to entertain two small Colombian girls. Dale realizes that even translated into their native language, the phrase copo de nieve really held no meaning for the children:

This was the lesson that kept recurring in my travels; that the ideas I had been raised with, the truths that had formed my childhood, my adolescence, and my early adulthood were limited by geography. They collapsed in on themselves when transferred to a foreign place. “The way things are” was rarely a true statement; it needed to be amended to “the way things are here.” So much of what I had learned growing up was really just arbitrary.

I’m sure the other books mentioned in the GoNomad article provide more of the same mix of humor and perspective on female travel. I give two thumbs up to Dale’s contribution.

One comment

  1. Nice post and good find, Kelly! I had selected a piece from Wendy Dale’s book to include in Thong, but it got cut.

    I’m still not quite ready to tell people the final list of who is included in the final version of the Thong Also Rises. I will be returning my manuscript of the final on Monday, so the process is still going on. Sorry.

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