Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of two Grand Prize Solas Awards including the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News. She lives in Connecticut.

Table of Contents 1. Masha2. The Precipice3. Cold War Game Theory4. The Offer that Refused Me5. Un Matin de SeptembreInterlude: Halloween6. To The Man at the Urinal in Prague7. The Substitute 8. Love’s Labour’s Won9. The Language of Sculpture, and of WordsInterlude: Cape Town10. Waiting for the Sun11. Goodnight Sweetheart12. One Day, Three Dead Men13. Green Pastures and the Ghosts of Rwanda14. Twenty Years and Counting15. The Romance of Traveling Alone16. Milk Bread Butter Chocolate17. Headlights18. Connie Britton’s Hair19. The Stories They Tell                    Interlude: Dog Walk20. Falling21. Seven Draughts of Coffee22. Petra or Bust 23. Into the Cold24. Winter (With Apologies to Colette)25. Time or the Sahara Wind26. Take me With You27. Signs of Life and Death in Africa28. He’s Leaving Home29. Willa Cather in Lavandou30. Fear and Solace in the Big Bend31. Brass City32. The VoyagePostscript

"Restless to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the unrelenting pull between the past and the present, between traveling the world and staying home. Starting in a dreary Moscow hotel room in 1983, weaving back and forth to rural New England, and ending on a West Texas trail in 2020, Marcia DeSanctis tells stories that span the globe and half a lifetime. ... Over quicksand in France, insomnia in Cambodia, up a volcano in Rwanda, spinning through the eye of a snowstorm in Bismarck, and atop a dumpster in her own backyard, this New York Times bestselling author, award-winning essayist, and journalist for Vogue and Travel + Leisure immerses us in places waiting to be experienced and some that may be more than we're up for"--Publisher marketing.