TAKE THE HIGH ROAD: A Primer for the Independent Traveler

This truly is a primer with hundreds of pages of associated travelogue for the independent traveler. While the world’s popular travel guidebooks are valuable resources, they omit the practical aspects of how to travel for up to months at a time without your life coming apart at the seams. Whether it’s how to handle your phones, your PC’s, your finances, your security, your car and even how to choose a suitcase – it’s covered in this book. So is how to structure journeys and choose between cruise lines, trains and airlines. In short, learn how to travel like a pro.

This book is huge and covers travels to every continent, across and around the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. It includes comparisons of fifteen cruises, a month’s worth of trains in Africa, a month’s drive across India, a month and a half in Italy, the same in Japan and extended stays in Israel, Belgium and elsewhere. The book covers choices of where to stay (whether safari lodge, maharajah’s palace, Japanese traditional ryokan, castle on a hill or spa), where to eat and what sort of eclectic items there are to buy around the world – and where to find them. It tells how much taxis and tour guides should cost, how much to tip, how big a discount is reasonable to negotiate to, how to find a free walking tour of a city and where to find free Wi-Fi in hundreds of locations around the world. The book begins with a detailed and chronological table of contents and ends with a geographical index for those who want to read about a specific part of the world.

Both to keep the size of the book’s file rational and to allow it to be portable to a wide variety of e-readers (Kindle, PC, mobile phone – whatever), the accompanying photos (about 17,000 of them) have been hosted on a special web based account just for readers of the book (no personal information is required to view them). They are designed to be viewed on a PC screen while reading the book, but can be viewed on any internet connected device.

In addition, there are bonus sections outlining custom detailed self-conducted walking tours in cities such as New York City, Shanghai, Tokyo and Lisbon, as well as multiple shopping and reminder lists for those heading out of town.

Whether you are an experienced traveler, just starting out or traveling vicariously, there is a lot in this book that will be novel and useful. Costing not much more than a cup of coffee, with hundreds of tips designed to save you time and money, the first time you use it, the book will likely pay for itself.