Change Your Life Through Travel

Jillian Robinson, an award-winning travel documentary filmmaker, whose television programs have aired on PBS, The Discovery Channel, and in more than 45 nations, has traveled to 33 countries and lived in Italy and London. She took a break from her career to travel, and as a result, she produced a new book that shows us how to take back home what we learned, felt and experienced while exploring in our journeys.

Change Your Life Through Travel explores eight central themes from life on the road, including how to: discover greater self-esteem, take more risks, buck convention while celebrating our individuality, slow down and live in the moment, connect with the power of nature while finding our wild side, feel sexy, step into our courage, and live an abundant life. The full-color images help the reader dramatically visualize the themes expressed throughout the book.

Jillian shares with us how to:

• Discover ways to foster our own life-enriching experiences on the road.
• Integrate the lessons of life lived afar or near into our everyday home life.
• Get more out of any trip you plan to take.
• Live life at a different level, at home and away, and see life through a new lens.

For over six years, Jillian followed in the footsteps of some of the greatest writers, traveling across the country and globe to go where others had gone before, including: Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Isak Dinesen, and D.H. Lawrence. She met a range of travelers that led to her penning her book. "I found myself no longer studying the life of a writer I admired, but rather, I was living it," says Jillian. "I had taken the author's life as my own, for a brief time, and in the process, I was transformed by it."

She has always had the travel bug in her. "Ever since my first trip to Europe as a teenager," says Jillian, "travel had become a consuming passion for me. It was the subject that would keep me reading, dreaming at night, and the prospect of which would stir me in the morning."

Along the way of her travels, Jillian...

• Learned of her adventurous spirit and risk-taking ways while in Kenya's Tsavo National Park and seeing a charging hippo up close.
• Danced the tango in Buenos Aires with a complete stranger, allowing her to venture into a sweet surrender.
• Journeyed to Italy, where writer DH Lawrence wrote several of his books and fell in love with farming life.
• Embraced the power of nature as she stood 12 feet away from two lions who mated loudly and intensely for 45 minutes in Africa.
• Felt the sway of the exuberant, vivacious women of Cuba, providing her an awareness of her own body that she'd never experienced before.

"Often we become so busy dealing with our daily lives and commitments that weariness sets in, and we no longer see, smell, taste, touch, and hear with the same purity we did as children, or when we travel," laments Jillian.

During her excursions she met dozens of people who shared their impacting travel stories with her, including:

• Barbi, who went hiking in the Grand Canyon, and broke her ankle seeking to evade a flash flood, needing a helicopter to rescue her.
• Glenn, who, while hiking a jungle in Rwanda, came upon a dozen gorillas. The youngest ones brushed up against his feet. But when he went to photograph a gorilla nursing her baby, she charged and took a swipe at him.
• Michael, who went to Jamaica, and dove off a cliff on a dare.
• Carol, who ascended a pyramid in Mexico alone, and then had a moment of stage fright from being so high up.
• Alexandra, who went to Spain and ended up posing nude for Salvador Dali.

One of the many travelers she met, Jeannette, a Native New Yorker who has lived in California, the Virgin Islands, and Arizona, and has traveled to countless places, almost always alone, sums up the value of travel as follows: "Travel does change your life. It gives you a freedom that you probably didn't know you were allowed to have. It's given me a different view of the world. If I had stayed on Long Island, in my little community, I never would have met the people I have, and people of all societal strata. So travel has made me grow and given me the kind of freedom that many people have never experienced."

Jillian concludes: "Travel often provides such opportunities to venture, gently into the unknown. How many more enriching experiences could we have in our lives, if only we saw through a different lens? Now, whenever I feel daunted by a new opportunity, I always try to take it. Because I know that down that road is often where the magic moments lie."

Change Your Life Through Travel

Publication Data: Change Your Life Through Travel: Inspiring Tales and Tips for Richer, Fuller, More Adventurous Living by Jillian Robinson; Published September, 2006; Trade Paperback; 207 pgs.; $14.95; ISBN: 0-9770168-0-3; Distributed by IPG

Contact Information: Planned Television Arts Brian Feinblum 212-583-2718 feinblumb@plannedtvarts.com