travel
Taking shelter in Leon (Drive Day 64 minus 14 years)
The streets flood in minutes when afternoon storms hit this Colonial city. A teenager brings us inside his house to wait it out, and there are cold beers with a view of the cathedral when skies clear.
It’s a stunning city, offering protection on both journeys. The first time around it’s where we met the publisher of El CentroAmericano, who took us in so that his wife Yanina could nurse me back from a bout of malaria. She still recognizes me and the chance to thank her makes every bump on the road we’ve travelled worth it.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Sandinista country here we come: maybe (Drive Day 63 minus 14 years)
Nicaragua is just on the other side of this dusty crossing, but we may never get in. You can read about the misadventures of borders in this free chapter from The Drive on Goodreads (scroll down a tad), but the gist is that officials think our DC license plates are fake. And that’s before paranoid me hands over a photocopy of the truck’s title instead of the original. Now we’re suspicious travelers from a country Nicaragua has a right to hold at arm’s length.
Five hours later and we straggle in to a trucker’s hotel on the outskirts of Leon to escape the heat of the camper. A quick peek at mom’s journal and I see how my parents handled border hassles: showing a $500 traveler’s check as proof of not being able to make change for bribes. Brilliant.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Glimpsing Honduras (Drive Day 62 minus 14 years)
The Pan-American amounts to only a pinch of coastal Honduras, far from the population centers and any tourists. Follow Gary’s arrow down to our only stop on his map: San Lorenzo. We’d press on to Nicaragua and yet another border but for the rain. It’s too hot to sleep inside the un-airconditioned camper so we suffer through some dubious motel art.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Honduras (Drive Day 61 minus 14 years)
The bumper sticker would say “I brake for iguanas,” but actually we’re just curious how much the boy on the side of the Pan-American wants for it. Eight bucks, U.S., it turns out. But that’s if we want to keep it. Most people eat them. Just to take a photo? A bargain at a dollar. We can hear the kid laughing at the stupid foreigners all the way across the river.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now.
Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Is Memoir Sexist?
When it happened, I assumed it was my fault. My latest book (The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan-American Highway) didn’t start out as a memoir. My non-fiction book proposal was a political comparison of every Latin American country I drove through in 1973 to what I observed thirty years later. Same route, by 2003, would there be progress?
I had a journalism masters’ from the University of Missouri-Columbia, a PBS documentary under my belt, almost a decade of reporting experience and a year’s worth of research invested before I even hit the road. My pitch flopped: I got no takers as straight-up literary journalism. The only interest came from memoir. At the time, the now-a-major-motion-picture “Glass Castle” was a huge memoir and I chalked it up to the publishing world’s irritating, just-like-the-last-bestseller attitude. One editor asked me to re-write The Drive from the perspective of 7-year-old me; others wanted me to focus on my relationship with Gary and still another wanted it to be about my parents’ nightmarish journey through grief.
Fast forward 11 long years and I found the right agent and editor and it’s water under the bridge. But should it be? I’m speaking at the Decatur Book Festival Saturday, September 2nd and I’ve just had a long phone conversation with my co-panelist, an exciting travel memoirist named Stephanie Elizondo Griest. Who is probably cringing while reading my description of her because she’s finally published a straight up literary journalism/political wake-up call piece of non-fiction called “All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands.” Hardly “just” memoir.
We haven’t met in person, but on the phone discovered more than a love of Spanish, travel and writing in common. She was “nudged” into memoir too and thinks it’s a little too much of a coincidence, given her professional background and expertise. We’re not the first to wonder why it is that women, particularly women of color, are considered more “marketable” in this genre.
Don’t get me wrong. It might be feminine and conflict-averse of me, but I don’t want any memoir-lovers out there to think I’m trash-talking my own genre. At its Beryl Markham, Sylvia Bedford best, memoir is transporting and transformative. So I’m not really sure it’s a slight to labeled “memoirist.” The itchy part is the less-than-transparent nudging and gender-based assumptions that accompany women writers along the road to publication.
Asia
Here’s a fun new blog I follow, back at the beginning of his road trip
The start of my 2017 travels. South East Asia is renowned for being one of the best places to travel in the world, full of spectacular scenery, wonderful people and amazing activities, as well as its cheap prices for everything you could possibly need, Asia is a great place to begin backpacking.
As ever, nothing is straightforward in my life, so I began my journey with my mum. Whether she was inspired by jealousy or a motherly worry, we cycled through Thailand and Cambodia together, seeing the sites she hadn’t seen for 25 years and discovering ones even her well-travelled old soul had not yet seen. Once the cycling was over, I met up with old friends from school for a more modern take on travelling before jetting off for a week of diving and surfing in Bali. The contrasts from what my mother had experienced to what I had…
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Barbed wire and bougainvillea (Drive Day 60 minus 14 years)
If camping in San Salvador isn’t recommended, neither is driving a 2,500 pound camper through its byzantine streets. Men guard toy stores with machine guns and bougainvillea drapes from coils of barbed wire topping every building. By noon we are utterly on edge and lost, nowhere near the address handwritten in my mother’s faded journal. So I show it to a cab driver, hop into the front seat of his taxi and let Gary follow us to the first road angel from my past.
The address belongs to a retired dentist named Ernesto. He was still practicing when my little sister smashed the teeth out of her mouth falling on our camper steps. We were creatures from a Steinbeck novel and he let us stay on his coastal farm while Jenny recovered. Today I get to thank him for her. And for me. Because finding him provides the counterweight to my unfounded fears.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now.
Kentucky Fried Civilization (Drive Day 59 minus 14 years)
Recuperated, we head into El Salvador’s capitol. The sound of horns comes as a shock. You don’t realize how distracting they are until you drive through an entire country the size of Guatemala without hearing a single, rude beep. Everyone seems underdressed too; wearing ball caps and T-shirts with Nike and Coke logos instead of elaborate woven traje. Just to round out the culture shock, we stop for Chinese food.
But it is getting late and under the Central American Handbook section for camping in San Salvador there is only this: camping is not advised. So we pay to park at a hotel and Gary backs the camper up so close to a wall that the door only opens six inches.
Gary sketches bugs from the day’s grill kill until there is no light. It feels like we’ve locked ourselves in prison.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now.
Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Salvation in El Salvador (Drive Day 58 minus 14 years)
We need a road trip attitude check, a runaway paranoia ramp and this lake, nestled in the caldera of an El Salvadoran volcano, comes just in time. Young men who could be recently deported gang members sit in the shade of trees nailed with signs saying no firearms. But as far as I can prove I am the only one harboring a gun and we pay five dollars to camp in a roped off area labeled “eco-reserve.” At dusk the only sound comes from the poles of old men fishing for striped lake perch in their underwear.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com
Scenes of crimes imagined (Drive Day 57 minus 14 years)
I ask Gary to photograph me standing in the exact spot where our camper steps were stolen 33 years ago. Right out of the Antigua church parking lot I recognized the instant I saw it again. The second trip down the Pan-American Highway our steps didn’t even make it this far; some other traveler is probably bargaining for them at the Todos Santos Saturday market right now.
Maybe that’s why my mind leaps to conclusions when the camper starts shaking as I fall asleep. Memories intermingle with paranoia and I’m convinced a gang of robbers is trying to tip the camper. So convinced that I drop to the floor and yank the loaded gun from its hiding place. Gary is already outside, swatting at the darkness with a broomstick. We are equally ashamed and embarrassed to discover the real culprit the next morning: an earthquake. Clearly, it is time to move on.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now.
Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
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