The Camper's Guide to Outrunning the Grim Reaper: A Grumpy Woman's Perspective

Pat Kanis was approaching sixty and a self-described “uptown girl” when she tied the knot again with a charming widower. She’d barely said “I do” before her nature-loving husband, Tom, purchased a twenty-three-foot travel trailer for a cross-country trip.

In theory, Pat liked traveling and spending time outdoors. But then she discovered that Tom thought that details like running water, good weather, and four walls attached to a foundation were optional luxuries when camping.

As the two drove across the country, visiting national parks and monuments and assorted friends and relatives, they encountered both hellish landscapes and unexpected patches of paradise. Pat got her fill of public showers, aggressive truck drivers with apparent death wishes, and dinosaur bones, and she seriously questioned her husband’s definition of a good time.

Through it all—the biting grasshoppers, the ponds full of dead frogs, the psychotic cats under beds—Pat kept her sense of humor, and in the end, she learned that some of life’s most wonderful moments stem from those you cannot control.

This hilarious, feel-good memoir will appeal to readers who enjoy a good travel yarn, whether they share Tom’s incurable wanderlust or Pat’s preference for the comforts of home.

Pat Kanis was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. She lives in Snohomish, Washington, with her husband, Tom.