May 20th, 2009

Women's Adventure Magazine

Rachel En Fuego!
Article in a national magazine dream comes true….

At last, my goal of writing for a national adventure magazine has come true! Just in time for Mother’s Day, I’ve recently had a story about Mama Chihuahua’s and my notoriously soggy, humbling trek on the Routeburn in New Zealand published in Women’s Adventure Magazine. I’ve just received advance copies from the arts editor (Krisan Christensen…thanks, Krisan!). If you’ve never checked the magazine out before, you’re in for a treat! It’s hip, fun, and edgy covering all types of adventures from house-swapping around the world (hopefully involving a house you actually own) to crushes and camping to a Green Action Superhero Comic Strip and interviews of incredible adventure divas. It’s the only travel, sports, and outdoor-related magazine dedicated solely to women. I was also tickled to death that I made the contributors’ page alongside the letter from the editor.

My boyfriend often asks me why I go to the trouble of spending countless hours during and after trips to write my travel blogs and sometimes I ask myself the same question. The first answer that comes to mind is that I just have to! Some unknown and obsessive force drives me to do it. It doesn’t feel like an adventure or a real journey unless I’m able to share it with friends. The second reason is that I love the feedback and dialogue I have with my friends, family, and fellow kindred spirits that is inspired by these blogs.

Lastly, every now and then, I actually get a really cool cosmic return from them like from this one. Just a little after I sent out my trekking blog from the South Island of New Zealand, I received an email from the editor (Michelle Theall, a cool, adventurous woman in her own right who I’ve come to know through the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference over the years) at Women’s Adventure telling me she thought I should write a cool short story for the mag based on the blog.

So there it is, blogging does pay-off. Not a lot, but every now and then you never know how it may come back to you.

You can pick the June Issue of the magazine up at Border’s, REI, Whole Foods, and Barnes and Noble. You can also order subscriptions directly through the magazine’s website at www.womensadventuremagazine.com
I’ll give you a quick glimpse of the article, “The Amnesia of Adventure: Lest we forget we're in this together:”
Since the mag has first dibs by contract on the story for the next six months, I can’t print the whole thing here quite yet. You’ll have to grab a copy at your local bookstore to read the whole story. Here's an excerpt:

“The Amnesia Of Adventure”

By Rachel S. Thurston
For Women’s Adventure Magazine
Appearing in the June 2009 Issue on pages 46-47.

Why my sixty-two year old Mum and I choose to shoulder forty pound backpacks across mountains in bad weather, lather ourselves in bug spray, subsist for days on dehydrated pasta, and sleep in bunkhouses with snoring, equally smelly strangers baffles me. It’s rare in our many years of travels to come across other mother and daughters, let alone women my mother’s age attempting to trek where we do. There’s probably good reason for this. We suffer from what I refer to as "Trekking Amnesia," in which a year usually passes by and memories of our agony are replaced with blissful nostalgia.

We’ve crossed the world’s highest pass in mid-winter only to have our lunch frozen solid in our chest pockets by noon, battled hypoxia and AMS with copious loads of garlic and diamox, and trekked the rice fields of Vietnam during the beginning of monsoon, yet it’s these experiences which keep us booking our tickets again and again.

This past year we’ve chosen to do the Routeburn Track, one of the Great Walks of New Zealand, an area which we’ve recently learned receives over two-hundred inches of rain a year. As we stop in for our permits, a park ranger informs us that a late spring storm is coming through for the length of our trek. I look over at my mother hoping that she’ll be the one to say, “Let’s just scrap this whole trekking thing and stay in town and eat chocolate.” But she doesn’t and my competitive spirit maintains its silence. ....

To read more, you can check out the Women's Adventure Magazine website (they'll post it when the next issue comes out) in a few months for a digital download or you can buy a copy at your local Borders.

May 19th, 2009
Destination Wine Country Article
"Free-Wheelin: A Romantic Bike Trip Through Santa Ynez Valley"






For the past year or so, I've had the opportunity to write for the Santa Barbara-based Destination Wine Country Magazine. It's been a joy working with the editor, Laura Sanchez, whom I also have known as a friend through my band King Bee, for many years now. I can't tell you what it means as a writer to be able to write stories I'm passionate about and to have such incredible communication with the editor. We've started a tradition of having coffee a few times a year to talk about new story ideas and our own love of travel, Spanish, and literature.

The most recent summer issue (the most gorgeous cover I've seen them have yet!) features an article I wrote about a romantic bike trip through Santa Ynez Valley with my Baby Love. The only downer is that they replaced every reference I made to my "Baby Love" with either "boyfriend" or "Steve." Can you imagine?! ;)

"Steve" and I had great fun doing "research" for this article...research which included several glasses of wine, a very leisurely downhill bike ride, strolling through a lavendar farm, and stuffing ourselves with deli sandwiches and strawberries. After finishing the book The Beautiful Santa Ynez Valley with photographer Chuck Place in 2007, it was pure joy to go up to the Valley just for fun and to write a short piece. By design, Chuck was hired to do the photography for the piece so the four of us (including his wife Ger) made a fun day of it....a lot of it involving Chuck getting in our faces with a big lens telling us to look at each other longingly and to stop drinking all our wine before he had taken his fill of photos.

I'm stoked with how the article came out and pleased once again to have the opportunity to work with a good friend (Chuck), go biking with my Baby Love (Steve), and continue working with a wonderful editor (Laura).

You can check out issues of Destination Wine Country at wineries throughout the Valley and at various bookstores in Santa Barbara.

Just for fun, I'm going to include some of Chuck's photos from the shoot that weren't included in the article. You can check out his gorgeous website at www.placephotography.com

I'm stoked to have another one of my travel humor stories in the newest Travelers' Tales book, More Sand In My Bra. "Oh, The Places She Will Go," will be appearing along with stories by comedian Ellen Degeneres and chic-lit author Suzanne Schlosberg (The Curse of the Single Table). If you've ever been amused and frustrated by the stereotypical Yankee ignorance of world geography, then you'll get a kick out of "Oh, The Places She Will Go." Word has it that Ellen Degeneres' story is almost as witty as mine and that her agent is fast on my heels. ;-)

Edited by Jennifer Leo and Julia Weiler, More Sand In My Bra is another satirical collection of Ms.Adventures from the road (a follow-up to their last anthologies, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?...I'm not even kidding about the title). It you're not familiar with Travelers Tales, they're one of the largest travel anthology book publishers in the U.S.A. Their humor series, written largely by women, has become a bread and butter, best-selling series. You can find many of their titles in the narrative travel section of your local bookstore. More Sand In My Bra makes for quick, entertaining reading on your holiday trip home. And at $14.95 it's also the perfect birthday gift for your free-spirited, wandering friends and paramours...or at least, those of your loved ones dreaming of mai tais and bad sex with strangers in far away lands...

If you order it (of course, try to buy at your locally-owned bookstore first), please remember to post a review on Amazon.com. Thanks again and happy October reading!

Order More Sand In My Bra on Amazon

Some great news this week. For the past five years, I've wanted to get a travel story into a Travelers Tales anthology (you can find a ton of them in the narrative travel section at local bookstores) and now, after opening my veins up at the keyboard, staying up late into the wee hours of the morning, and enduring years of writers' conferences, critiques, and revisions...the literary genie is delivering!

The book is hot off the press... My story "Mama Chihuahua: World's Fiercest Travel Partner," is featured in the newest humor travel anthology "What Color Is Your Jockstrap?" along with stories by Susan Orlean (author of "The Orchid Thief") and Tim Cahill (award-winning travel writer and founding editor of "Outside Magazine"). This is an excellent and hilarious collection of stories by some heavy-hitters in American Travel writing....Rolf Potts, Elliott Hester, Doug Lansky, as well as several other literary wanderlusts.

With eager anticipation, I have several booksigning events arranged over the summer:

-Book signing on the 4th of July in Cataract Falls, Indiana. (Actually, this one will be small but mighty...a crew of my father and stepmother's friends will be gathering...)

-Book signing and a slideshow (on North Vietnam) on Thursday, July 13th at Red's Cafe in Santa Barbara, CA from 7-11 p.m.

-Book signing, party, and Vietnam slideshow with the Thurston Girls (Mama Chihuahua and yours truly) in Flagstaff, Arizona on July 22nd.

-Book signing with Tim Cahill and editor Jen Leo at Book Passage Bookstore in Corte Madera, CA on August 16th.

Lots of good stuff coming together this year!
If you've read the book, please give us a good plug on Amazon.com. Jen Leo, the folks at T Tales, myself, and all of the other contributors would love to see this book continue with great success. The other books in this series have all been best-sellers...keeping our fingers crossed with sweet anticipation!

For more updates on other booksigning event and juicy info about the contributors, check out Jen Leo's sexy site:

What Color Is Your Jockstrap

Thanks always for all of your support!

Rachel's Croatia article and photography to appear in the Los Angeles Times Travel Section on 4/23/06

I'm super stoked to announce that one of my stories about traveling to the Mediterranean-like island of Hvar in southern Croatia will be published in the travel section of the Los Angeles Times this coming Sunday, April 23rd.
If you don't have a subscription, pick up a copy of the paper at your local bookstore—it's sure to be a collector's edition :)—or go to www.latimes.com/travel on Sunday to see an online version of the article.
The great thing about getting a hardcopy of the article (nudge, nudge!) is that a few of my photos will be published along with the feature article.

Thanks to twenty years of travel, five years of typing until my fingers bleed, three years of writers' conferences, two years of graduate school, and boundless persistence that runs like a blessed curse through my family, some of my hard work is starting to finally pay-off!

Stay tuned for more exciting news: One of my humorous travel stories, "Mama Chihuahua: World's Fiercest Traveling Partner," will be featured in the May 2006 book, "What Color Is Your Jockstrap?" (writers...I know this should be italicized but I'm having formatting issues with blogger this morning) along with other short stories by Susan Orlean (author of "The Orchid Thief" and inspiration for the Nicolas Cage movie "Adaptation") and Tim Cahill ("Jaguars Ripped My Flesh").

Other upcoming news: My official website will be officially launched on May 1, 2006.