A Travel Junkie's Diary

Dina Bennett’s on the road again—and she can’t stop! Having completed the 7,800-mile Peking to Paris Classic Car Challenge while braving carsickness and patching rocky marital relations, she’s once more in over her head, enduring 100,000 miles of road trips through the world’s out-of-the-way places.

Drawn to strange foods and intriguing views into the kaleidoscope of local life, and with a knack for getting into—and out of—awkward situations, Dina gives you the world in all its glory. She’s a born storyteller, uncovering the curious and unusual in the ordinary, bringing you along on vivid experiences in laugh-out-loud style. Neither particularly brave nor wild, she opens her diary of personal triumphs and embarrassments, suspense and discovery, in places most will never get to. Join her as she stands knee-to-knee with a Tajik border guard in his bedroom, hunts down camel pad meat in the street markets of China, and seeks out the source of mare’s milk in Kyrgyzstan. Whether stranded on a sandbar in Myanmar’s Chindwin River or sharing barley beer with an ex-Black Panther in Ethiopia, Dina’s observations are half prying neighbor, half best friend gossiping together on the crooked path to enlightenment.

The tales in A Travel Junkie’s Diary plunge the reader right into the midst of exhilarating travel experiences, with all the smells, sounds, sensations and emotions of being right there. They are by turns fascinating and frightening, endearing and bittersweet, humorous, humiliating, and always engrossing.

Dina Bennett was born in Manhattan. After five years as a PR executive, she joined her husband’s software localization company as senior VP of sales and marketing. The two worked side by side until they sold the firm in 1998 and abandoned corporate life for a hay and cattle ranch. Since then she has untangled herself from barbed wire just long enough to get into even worse trouble in old cars on over 100,000 miles of far-off roads. She is the author of Peking to Paris, and she resides in France.

“A Travel Junkie’s Diary is, by turns, confessional, amusing, and very informative. Perhaps Dina’s greatest talents lie in her keen descriptive powers which beckon to the reader to hitch a vicarious ride.” —Mary-Lou Weisman, author of Playing House in Provence and Traveling While Married

“These are not your average road trips. . . . Instead of the thrills, though, Bennett travels to seek everyday moments where she can connect with people whose lives are vastly different from hers. Bennett’s chatty style enlivens this enjoyable travelogue, cleverly grouped into themes instead of chronological accounts. While the couple faces the many challenges of life on the road, they are richly rewarded by what their experiences allow them to become.” —Booklist

“Bennett rollickingly recounts her ten years of driving around the globe . . . an exhilarating journey.” —Publisher’s Weekly