Moon Handbooks Chesapeake Bay

One of Joanne Miller's earliest memories is of being lulled by the hum of car wheels as she gazed out the window of a wine-colored Oldsmobile; the scenery changed from dense forests to cornfields to dry plains. Her father, a freelance photographer, was taking pictures in the U.S. National Parks System for National Geographic. By age 10, she had visited every state in the lower 48. Comic books made interesting companions on the road, and "travel" became synonymous with "adventure," all in an easy-to-follow four-color format. While camping in a musty tent in New Mexico, Joanne followed Scrooge McDuck to the South Pacific, climbed Egypt's pyramids, and hoisted sail with Huey, Dewey, and Louie alongside Jason's Argonauts. An appreciation of fine literature followed, in the form of "Classics Illustrated"-Macbeth was a terrific ghost story. By the time Joanne was reading books with more words than pictures, she had written and illustrated one of her own: a primer on "How to Do Everything Right." Martha Stewart, eat your heart out. After surviving her know-it-all teens, and adding Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, England, and Canada to her list of "been-theres," Joanne first glimpsed the mighty Chesapeake. After securing a B.A. in anthropology, she crossed Mexico and traveled up the eastern states through the Necks of Virginia, along the coast of America's largest estuary. In the following years, she lived in the mid-Atlantic, visiting the Tidewater to crack crabs in Virginia Beach and indulge in fantasies of powdered wigs in Colonial Williamsburg. She continues to live and write her own adventures in full color, whether it's watching the fiery sun set under full sail near St. Michaels, dodging feisty crabs on Smith Island's oyster-shell roads, or feeling the burn while climbing Baltimore's Washington Monument. Every place has its story, and Joanne makes the landscape come alive through words and pictures. She is the author of Moon Handbooks Pennsylvania and Moon Handbooks Maryland and Delaware and is a frequent contributor to Writer's Market and Novel and Short Story Writer's Market. Joanne is a teacher and certified coach, specializing in writers' development. Her short stories have appeared online and in print, and she is currently working on a novel of old San Francisco, Land's End, and a journal/marketing calendar for writers. Julian Smith has been writing since he learned to read, and traveling since the first family trip to Cape Cod as a toddler. A pre-college summer in Brazil sparked a love affair with (and in) Latin America, fueled by a stint studying the cloud forests of Costa Rica. Days after wrangling a degree in biology from the University of Virginia, he found himself hopelessly entangled in a self-publishing venture that resulted nine months later in the one-pound, eight-ounce On Your Own in El Salvador, the first in-depth guide to the country. Moon Handbooks Ecuador came two years later. Tired of sounding like a third-grader with grammar issues, Julian returned to Virginia, where everyone kept saying the same thing: "Didn't you graduate?" And there was much rejoicing. In addition to authoring Moon Handbooks Virginia and Moon Handbooks Four Corners, he has contributed to Road Trip USA, National Geographic Traveler, and other publications. He has somehow earned a master's degree in wildlife ecology in the meantime, eating smoked salmon and studying grizzly bears on the coast of British Columbia. As far as normal jobs go, Julian has done pretty well. He's worked as a Canyonlands National Park ranger, guided tourists through the Central American rainforest, and tried (in vain) to protect the vegetable garden of one of the richest men in the world from marauding rodents. Along the way, he's found himself freezing atop Kilimanjaro, meditating in a Japanese Zen temple, being doused with rum in a Cuban santeria ceremony, and fleeing from Ugandan pygmies, through absolutely no fault of his own. He is currently editing a journal for the Ecological Society of America in Washington, D.C. Snowboarding, mountain biking, and rock climbing still keep things interesting back east, and the rest of the time goes towards watching reruns of The Simpsons. For more travel writing, photography, updates, and assorted oddities, stop by his website, www.juliansmith.com.Miller, Joanne is the author of 'Moon Handbooks Chesapeake Bay', published 2004 under ISBN 9781566916226 and ISBN 1566916224.