Travel 6 of 1: P+H Travel Anthology

Ghanaian chicken dances, gun-toting Syrian generals, Madonna's True Blue album and a joyful four-year-old star in this collection of travel tales where everything is on the menu, from Spanish churros to Middle Eastern mezzas to Southern barbecue to roasted cat flank.

With stories set in the dusty corners of Ghana's capital, Accra, in a Crusader castle high on a crag outside Homs, Syria, in church yards, motels and barbecue shacks in Tennessee, in hospital waiting rooms and intensive care units in Massachusetts, much too close to towering burning effigies in Spain and on a flotilla of cruise ships from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Alaska, TRAVEL 6 of 1, the first collection of travel stories from P+H Books is, at turns, riotously funny and deeply moving.

In Of Smoke And Churros, Geraldine DeRuiter, of hilarious travel website, The Everywhereist, stands way too close to burning objects when she coincides with the fiery Fallas festival on a deep fried dessert-eating vacation in Valencia.

Award-winning travel writer and ex-pat Scot, Aefa Mulholland, wades deep into America's Mid-South in search of her lost Scottishness in Hark, The Pies Are Calling, encountering processions of pampered ducks, vats of barbecue and Miss Tennessee en route.

Acclaimed American travel writer Matthew Link crashes a trio of funerals in Accra in Offensive Optimism and learns about life, death and how to perfect the famous chicken dance of Ghana's Ewe tribe.

In Mariner's Club Mixtape, Hollywood writer, performer and filmmaker Dennis Hensley puts together a mixtape that soundtracks the romances and relationships, friendships and first times, hookups and letdowns from his five years working on cruise ships in the '80's and '90's.

Two Canadian women find themselves the only tourists in Syria in Carla Wilson's Christmas at The Krak, when they leave their English-teaching jobs in (alcoholically) dry Kuwait to spend a Bordeaux-saturated and eye-opening Christmas at the Krak des Chevaliers, a crusader fortress outside Homs in 2006.

In the beautiful Around And Into The Unknown,Hillary Savoie, and her daughter, Esmé, journey from the first ultrasound through ICU through diagnosis after diagnosis to acceptance during Esmé's first four tumultuous years of life.