Welcome

Spring News 2019

• This summer our website celebrates its 20th birthday. Stay tuned for some new stories from our favorite adventurers. And we'll be modernizing our site a little bit. We've been doing this in stages. Last time it took months to move almost 1000 pages into a database. Our website is so old — predating blogs, wordpress and every kind of content management system — that everything was hand-coded page by page—and that had to all be stripped out manually! We still have a lot of work to do as we try to unify our brand. It seems a lot of our peers our are giving up websites and moving to social media platforms.
• Whoa! Surprising news. The new 10th-anniversary edition of Falling Uphill has won a finalist award at the Next Generation Indie Book Awards in Memoirs (Personal Struggle). Next Generation Indie Book Awards is the largest not-for-profit awards program for independent publishers. What a big honor!
• Visit our Dreamaplay.com new children's website teach kids (and adults) how to dream and how to turn those dreams into reality.
• Super big, life changing news. After 4 years in development, we're excited to announce that Dream It! will be published by Magination Press "Self-help books for kids and the adults in their lives, written by experts and published by the American Psychological Association." We feel this is the perfect publisher for the Playbook's themes of passion, optimistic thinking and social emotional learning. We couldn't be more excited. The Dream Playbook has grown bigger than us and we just couldn't do it alone.

Previous highlights:

• After 1 year in the making, I'm proud to introduce a brand new 10th-anniversary edition of Falling Uphill with a new introduction and afterword, new lost chapter "Were you scared?" Excerpts from the original journals that were lost for over 10 years, including the fateful day of 9/11. And many more additions. There is also a new e-book with color pictures and an audio book.
• Why did I write an anniversary edition? Because a lot of friends and fans have been wondering how my life has turned out since the big trip, and because I wanted to include a new afterword about my biggest discover yet, one that could only occur after many years of integrating everything that I had learned from my trip. This is what makes Falling Uphill different than most travelogues — it doesn’t end happily ever after in some foreign land, but continues after the return home, profound culture shock and the difficult struggle to integrate everything I had learned. Are you wondering if the trip was worthwhile, did it change me or make the world a better place? Are you wondering whether to make your own big journey or change? Then this is the book for you.
• Since we last spoke, I've also written a new book about monarch butterflies. This was part of a year-long author-in-residence project at a local elementary school. I didn't think it would take a year, but it required a lot of organizing, and we did so much more than just make a book. We actually increased the number of monarch butterflies in our neighborhood. Read all about how we helped save the monarch butterflies. I'm super proud of this. We donated over 600 books to students, teachers, schools and libraries.
• Ooh! I'm honored to be among the great legends of bicycling in this new book by Anna Hughes. Pedal Power: Inspirational Stories from the World of Cycling. Synopsis: A bike can be so many different things—a simple way of navigating busy city streets or enjoying quiet lanes, a cross-country steed to take a rider up hill and down dale, or even a world-beating racing machine. What unites everyone who rides is that they each have their own cycling story to tell. This book collects inspirational stories from riders around the world, both ordinary and extraordinary, from the London cyclist who rode 10,000 km in a month, to the daredevil trials rider who hops from building to building, to classic tales of grand-tour rivalries and legendary cycling records of days gone by. Essential reading for anyone who loves life on two wheels. Available on Amazon.