Scatter the Mud: Traveller's Medley, A

Nancy Lyon is hardly your typical traveller. Although her travel pieces have been widely published in the New York Times, GEO, Ms., Travel and Leisure, enRoute, the Montreal Gazette, the Chicago Tribune, and the Miami Herald, to name a few of the publications from which this collection has been culled, Lyon is an adept at "scattering the mud"-- an old Irish expression used to describe a kind of rough or ungentlemanly travel.Lyon's adventures began when she was 13 and her mother, a bored Indianapolis housewife, loaded her three young daughters into a station wagon and headed off to Mexico for the summer. Despite knowing no Spanish, temporarily losing her sister in a tortilla factory, and almost drowning in the Gulf of Mexico, Lyon survived the trip. And she was hooked.Since then, Nancy Lyon has lived in many places and circled the globe, exploring UFO sites in Florida and even stranger sights in SoHo, barely escaping witch doctors in Guadeloupe, wintering on Inishbofin, and taking her mother along on a hilarious busking tour of Europe. For Lyon is also an accomplished musician; her love of music combined with her insatiable desire to travel have taken her into the streets across North America and Europe, busking with her medieval Irish harp, button accordian and tin whistle, literally singing for her supper. Lyon's music has served as her passport to adventure in the streets and cafés all across North America and Europe.