This fast-paced, often-humorous travel book tells the truly ridiculous story of how two British friends, Matt Bishop and Reece Gilkes, became the first people to circumnavigate the globe on a scooter with a sidecar. Their world-record-breaking 34,000-mile-long journey took them through thirty-five countries and across five continents. With no experience of mechanics, overlanding, or even riding motorbikes, the pair took their Honda scooter and barn-built sidecar through some of the world's toughest environments, including a scorching Sahara Desert and the frozen wilds of a Siberian winter.This heartwarming story will restore your faith in humanity as strangers all over the world save the pair from the life-threatening and downright idiotic situations in which they find themselves. At the same time, the book lifts the curtain on the issue of modern slavery, which still plagues every country on earth. Matt and Reece meet survivors of modern slavery and organisations fighting it all over the world, and the hard-hitting stories they share will leave you questioning your role in the issue-and asking how you can help. "Reading this refreshing book is easy-time just slips by-but that's the only easy thing about the whole affair. So my advice is: Think of something you'd love to do that's really quite ridiculously impossible. Then read the book. Then go and do it. I must say, it really takes me back . . ." - Ted Simon, author of Jupiter's Travels "The many threads of this gripping adventure unfold as a powerful, at times opinionated, heart-tweaking, fast-flowing journey of surprises. Woven into the stories are top tips, quirky facts about the lands traversed, and a wonderfully self-depreciating sense of humour. This story is proof that a positive attitude, determination, respect towards others, and wide-open minds can change the world. Adventurists are going to love the challenges and, at times, readers are going to have to put this book down so they can really think about the images attached to the words they have just read." - Sam Manicom, author of Into Africa."A powerfully-written tale about travelling with purpose. But what a daft machine to use!" - Paddy Tyson, Overland MagazineYou can also get a signed copy of this book with colour pictures at www.armchairadventurefestival.com/shop.

Each fun and intriguing volume in the award-winning series offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don't venture: the oddball curiosities, ghostly sites, local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and peculiar roadside attractions.

The most absurd, hilarious, and ridiculous travelogue ever told, by two hit-TV comedy writers who raced each other around the world-for bragging rights and a very expensive bottle of Scotch It started as a friendly wager: two old friends from The Harvard Lampoon, Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran now hotshot Hollywood scribes, challenged each other to a race around the globe in opposite directions. There was only one rule: no airplanes. The first man to cross every line of longitude and arrive back in L.A. would win Scotch and infamy. But little did one racer know that the other planned to cheat him out of the big prize by way of a ride on a quarter-million-dollar jet pack. What follows is a pair of hilarious, hazardous, and eye-opening journeys into the farthest corners of the world. From the West Bank to the Aleutian Islands, the slums of Rio to the steppes of Mongolia, traveling by ocean freighter and the Trans-Siberian Railway (pranking each other mercilessly along the way), Vali and Steve plunge eagerly and ill-prepared into global adventure. The Ridiculous Race is a comic travelogue unlike any other, an outrageous tale of two gentlemen travelers who can't wait to don baggy cardigan sweaters, clench corncob pipes between their teeth, and yell at their sons, "You lazy bums! When we were your age, we raced around the world without airplanes!"

"Meet Leda Foley; Devoted friend, struggling travel agent, sometime psychic. When Leda, proprietor of Foley's Flights of Fancy, books Seattle PD Grady Merritt on a flight back from Orlando, she does not expect it to change her life. When Grady watches the plane he was set to travel on catch fire while he remains safely in the airport, he seeks out Leda, and despite her rather scattershot premonitions, he enlists her help in investigating a cold case he just can't crack. But Leda has her own reasons for helping: her fiancé Tod was murdered under mysterious circumstances several years ago. Her psychic abilities weren't good then, but now she's been honing them at her favorite bar's open-mic nights, where she draws a crowd klairvoyant karaoke-singing whatever song comes to mind after holding other patrons' personal effects. With a rag-tag group of bar patrons and friends, Leda and Grady set out to catch a killer--and find that the two cases that haunt them may have more in common than they think"--

Massachusetts and weird: not too much of a stretch, some would say. But the authors dug a little deeper and found all kinds of local legends, bizarre beasts, surprising cemeteries, and uncovered the best kept secrets from all over the Bay State. If it's unusual or unexplainable or fantastic, and in the Bay State, you'll find it all here.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Bird by Bird comes a personal, wise, very funny, and “life-affirming” book (People) that shows us how to find meaning and hope through shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life. "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." —San Francisco Chronicle Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother." Despite—or because of—her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers—her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness. Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers."

This is a book for dedicated academics who consider spending years masochistically overworked and underappreciated as a laudable goal. They lead the lives of the impoverished, grade the exams of whiny undergrads, and spend lonely nights in the library or laboratory pursuing a transcendent truth that only six or seven people will ever care about. These suffering, unshaven sad sacks are grad students, and their salvation has arrived in this witty look at the low points of grad school. Inside, you’ll find: • advice on maintaining a veneer of productivity in front of your advisor • tips for sleeping upright during boring seminars • a description of how to find which departmental events have the best unguarded free food • how you can convincingly fudge data and feign progress This hilarious guide to surviving and thriving as the lowliest of life-forms—the grad student—will elaborate on all of these issues and more.