Growing up in one of those beach towns between San Diego and LA, I was a weird kid. While my brother surfed, I collected maps and spent hours poring over them on the living room floor, wondering what those strange places and foreign peoples were like. A year after college, I quit my job as a sports magazine editor, sold my Ford Pinto, drained my bank account, and bought a one-way ticket to South Africa. That was the start of 13 years overseas as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, freelance journalist, and sometimes novelist in Johannesburg, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore. One of those novels got optioned as a movie (that never got made) and an invitation to write for a TV production company in Hollywood. But I longed to hit the road again. And it was National Geographic that gave me that chance, a book about traveling the Pan American Highway from Texas to Argentina. While I’ll basically write about anything that involves travel, I’m especially keen on wide open spaces, road trips, and wandering aimlessly through new cities.