Woman Alone: A Six Month Journey Through the Australian Outback

AWARD-WINNING WOMEN'S TRAVEL MEMOIR. For fans of Cheryl Strayed (Wild) and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love). At twenty-seven, Laine Cunningham seemed to have it all. Surrounded by tons of friends, she held a college degree, enjoyed plenty of all-night parties, and had a secure job. Yet every morning she dragged herself through a life that was corporatized and overly industrialized, a life that falsely glamorized everything she was supposed to want. Guided only by a map pulled from an old copy of National Geographic, she camped in the Australian Outback for six months. And she did it alone. Traveling in a time before Expedia or Travelocity, and without any guidebook or travel guide from Lonely Planet, the trip was never intended to be a vacation. Instead, it was a search for something deeper, something that lay inside. Cheap plane tickets or the cost of the airfare were far less important than the investment Laine made in herself. The self-guided adventure tour around the country covered nearly 17,000 miles. Hostels were preferred to hotels, and then only when camping under the stars was not an option. Otherwise, her best accommodation was the red sand and her only travel guide was her instinct about where on the map to explore next. Told with warm humor and sparked with suspense, the search revealed the most important discovery any woman can make: herself. For fans of Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney, Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman, A Year by the Sea by Joan Anderson, Three Weeks with My Brother by Nicholas Sparks, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett, No Place Like Home by Brooke Berman, A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi, Gorge by Kara Richardson Whitely, My Paris Dream by Kate Betts, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman, and Graduates in Wonderland.