Review: ‘I’m Lost Again’

Robert Buckley of Marion likes to travel. Fortunately, he also likes to write about it.

In 'I'm Lost Again” (Irish Enterprises, $15 paperback, $3.99 ebook, 340 pages), the retired ad man chronicles traveling adventures in Mexico, Ecuador, Turkey, the Maritimes, Romania, Morocco and the Mediterranean.

Buckley is nothing if not adventurous. Did you notice one of the trips was to Romania? And, hey, the Mediterranean 'cruise” was on a freighter.

The author of three novels and a previous travel book about hiking trips in the United States and the British Isles, Buckley writes about his travels in an engaging, folksy style that is conversational in tone and as entertaining as it is educational.

'I'm Lost Again” opens with an account of a noble trip to southern Mexico with two companions in a 1964 fire truck being donated to a village there. The truck was purchased with $3,750 in donated funds. More fund raising, with the assistance of two churches, financed the trip, which took about a week in January 2000. Other than some silliness about occasional demerits for his travel partners, Buckley's account of the five-miles-per-gallon journey is about as amazing as you'd expect it to be. I mean, seriously, can you even imagine undertaking such a trip in a cold, uncomfortable fire truck?

Buckley braves the adventures of courier traveling (carrying unspecified documents for a company in exchange for reduced airfare) on his trip to Ecuador, which began with his thinking it was to Guadalcanal because of a little pronunciation problem. Turned out it was Guayaquil in Ecuador. That trip featured a hair-rising ride on top of a train down the Devil's Nose, a famous stretch of track on the rocky slopes of the Andes.

He experiences the beauty of the Mediterranean aboard a large freighter toting hundreds of automobiles. Among other things, we learn what it's like to negotiate extremely quick turnarounds during ports of call and that there's plenty of idle time when you book passage on a freighter.

Particularly interesting in Buckley's accounts of trips to Turkey in 2001 and the Mediterranean in 2012 was that he was out of the media loop during the Twin Towers attacks and the attack on our consulate in Benghazi. Information was scarce and sketchy, which caused considerable consternation for travelers.

Photos are few in this self-published book, so I found it helpful to keep a tablet at my side so I could readily search for photos to embellish Buckley's accounts.

Traveling is fun, easy and inexpensive when you let Bob Buckley do it for you. The book is available at Amazon.com or at repb35@gmail.com.