Right whales, for all their size, are surprisingly athletic. They roll, they slap their flukes, they lift their heads out of the water in a move known as a spy hop. They find playthings and are particularly fond of swimming repeatedly through clumps of seaweed, which slides over them like a feathered boa.

In my house, it is always a scramble from paycheck to paycheck.

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

A constant ongoing joke among the people that I travel with is my absolutely hopeless sense of direction. I'm able to get lost a half an hour from camp. I don't know how I do this.

The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.

I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.

When you've managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown - either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude - there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free