Ha ha, if you didn’t already feel the cloying desperation of self-promotion from the intro page or the writing page then perhaps another splash of the book cover will catch you:
I put this in because I just heard, through the miracle of the series of tubes called, I believe, “the interwebs”, from a participant from the Border to Border trip featured in the book above. Written by me. So imagine that, a series of ones and zeroes residing on some server somewhere that tells the story of a trip I took fifteen years ago with people from all over the continent, and one of those people finds my book and contacts me through another series of ones and zeroes that go racing through some digital hamster tubes. So it all comes back, the reality of this trip. When you put a lot of time into recounting an event from your past such as I’ve done with this book, it takes on a glossy sheen that can be mistaken for fiction and sometimes you forget that it was real and so much richer than you’ve put down in a few scribbles and anecdotes. Characters were (and are) real people, storylines crossed your own or bounced off in gentle tangents, lives went on after your part in the story was concluded. I’ve heard that one of the participants passed away a few years after the trip and for that I’m deeply sad. But for one tiny moment our lives intersected and in the retelling of that moment I hope to share some of the joy he brought me and my co-drivers.
Now down to the seedy self-promotion. Read the book! I still enjoy reading it and I’ll say it blends Bill Bryson-esque humor with Tim Cahill’s first-person travel writing. And it’s not just a travelogue of driving a truck on dirt roads–I spend much of the first third of the book getting into what kind of madness you’d have to belt yourself into a glorified tractor made by English turnip farmers and go hurtling into some of the most unforgiving and remote landscape on the continent. Owning a Land Rover is the messiest kind of love affair, one that may feature cursing and blood and ringing ears, but will leave you afterwards with a smile and a place in your heart that can only be filled with a green oval. Happy reading.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
This is a fantastic read! You laugh all the way through it. For someone who is clueless or even disinterested in car mechanics, it takes you through the experiences of the writer as if you were sitting in the passenger seat bumping along off road taking in the excitement along with the sometimes trauma. Get it!