The Year I Followed the Sun

While many contemplate roaming the world, at 22, Laurie Rutherford Pederson embarked on a solo journey of 365 days, beginning in December 1976. She recorded her many adventures, sublime to horrific, in twenty-seven journals from which this book emerged. The Victoria, B.C. native worked as a travel agent, creating her own itinerary to countries that intrigued her. She explored these exotic locations, each replete with its historic and often perilous political landscapes, using all means of transport: from a luggage rack on a train in India to rickshaws to horseback, even a boat on the Canal du Midi. Family friends in several countries provided respites of gracious hospitality and rollicking entertainment; but, to her credit, Pederson writes with equal appreciation of the many strangers-locals and fellow travellers-she encountered along the way. Her prose sparkles with hilarious interior monologues and a cinematographer's attention to detail. From a near-fatal motorcycle accident on Bali to a brush with death at the Israel-Lebanese border, there is adventure, romance, fear and reflection. The author left her secure home in Victoria as a young adventuress; she returned a woman. Pederson's memoir is contemplative yet spontaneous, capturing a time of great change in the world.