Book excerpt: When Carolyn Walton, journalist and mother of four, pitched her first travel story to the Ottawa Citizen in 1984, recounting her adventures in Rio de Janeiro, little did she realize that she was about to embark on a remarkable career that would span the globe--taking her from the jungles of the Amazon to palaces in St. Petersburg, on a pilgrimage in France to ports on the Caribbean, Baltic, Mediterranean, Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas, the Adriatic, North and South Pacific oceans. Prepare to be enlightened and entertained as you tread the path less taken to swim with deadly stingrays in Tahiti, kayak among bulbous- headed belugas in Hudson Bay or deep-sea dive through schools of phosphorescent groupers off Andros Island in the Bahamas. Lapland finds her a guest of the colourful Sami people, dining high above the Arctic Circle on smoked reindeer meat or drinking boiled billy tea by the billabong in Australia’s Outback and truffle hunting in Italy or learning to cook per gli stuzzicini from a famed Italian chef in la cucina of a 1000-year-old castello in Tuscany. The old adage: “Half the fun is getting there” just doesn’t compute when Carolyn’s much anticipated flight to Paris is politically- interrupted or a transfer to the wrong boat in the South Pacific leaves her abandoned on a Fijian island! This collection of tales and misadventures takes the travel lover on an engaging and often humorous journey to the heart of some sixty bucket list destinations around the globe.