WorldTrek: A Family Odyssey
Book Review by Greta Jenkins for  FamiliesOnlineMagazine.com    A family of four travels the world. Their goal was to cross all 360 lines of longitude and the equator. Russell and Carla Fisher and their two adolescent daughters Andrea and Lesley have the travel adventure of a lifetime when they take a year off from their life in Houston, Texas.    This is the book to read if you are planning a trip around the world or just dreaming about one. It shows the true spirt of adventure and provides practical know-how advice and tips. Advice about planning, packing and ways to make accommodations arrangements on the fly from Internet cafe's found along the way, is mixed in with vivid descriptions of places to see, modes of transportation, and ways to have a fun trip.    The Table of Contents provides an excellent roadmap for the book. Read about all of their travels or choose one of the 19 countries and many more cites they visited No matter if it is Stonehenge in Great Britain, Skellig Michael in Ireland, a youth hostel in Norway, the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, celebrating Lesley's' 14th birthday in Estonia, standing in Red Square in Moscow, wandering old town in Prague, hiking in Germany's countryside, strolling in the Louvre in Paris, eating at a Venetian Bakery, sitting in the amphitheater in Pompeii and taking an early morning jog around the Roman Colosseum, having Christmas in Athens, visiting the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, cruising the Nile in Egypt, navigating the train system and riding elephants in India, taking cooking lessons Thailand, walking on the Great Wall in China, watching Kabuki in Japan, camping the outback in Australia or enjoying the beach in the Cook Islands, the descriptions are detailed and vivid. You feel like you are there beside the Fisher family as they navigate, negotiate, and relish their way around the world.    They travel by air, ferry, train and rental car (best budget deal to see much in Europe). Some reservations for accommodations were made ahead --FamiliesOnlineMagazone.comWhile The Family Sabbatical Handbook . . . covers the idea of moving abroad for an extended period, WordTrek deals with an even more daunting plan: taking the family on a year-long trip around the world. Again, there are plenty of books and stories out there on singles and couples taking off to see the world, but precious little on doing it as a family unit.  This book part travelogue and part advice guide shows those with wanderlust that round-the-world travel is not just for freaks on the fringe of society. The authors admit to accumulating experiences rather than accumulating things, but otherwise they were a pretty typical family.  Sitting on the sidelines of the soccer field on a Saturday morning, you probably couldn t pick us out of the crowd.  Yet take off they did, selling a car, stashing possessions in storage, and heading off through Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, India, Thailand, East Asia, and Australia before returning home to Houston, Texas. The tone is conversational and direct, with clear-eyed observations and more showing than telling. If nothing else, the Fishers are good editors. In most writers  hands the one-year journey turns into enough details to fill a trilogy. Thankfully we just get the impressions and the highlights, along with tales of typical days getting around, getting meals, and finding a place to stay. The important lesson is that it can be done, with the right planning and the right attitude. Russell gets annoyed when a motel owner in their departure city keeps saying how lucky they are to go on this trip. "I wanted to say, 'Lady, if there is anything that was not involved in the last twelve months of planning, packing, negotiating and just plain grunt labor, it was not luck!'" It s not the lucky who travel for a year. It s the people like the Fishers: ordinary families who find a way to make it happen. --Tim Leffel, Perceptive Travel Book Reviews