Goodbye Hoop Skirts - Hello World!: The Travels, Triumphs and Tumbles of a Runaway Southern Belle

The life story of travel writer Mary Moore Mason is an unusual, colorful and sometimes hilarious account of adventures and upheavals, creativity and tenacity. The descendant of a courageous survivor of American Indian captivity, Mary Moore was brought up as a potential (if ultimately rebellious) Southern Belle in the racially segregated American South. She maneuvered her way into the previously all-male newsroom of a Virginia newspaper dedicated to the preservation of racial segregation - and then regularly attended mixed-race parties. She flew to Paris to reignite a summer romance with a handsome young Frenchman - and then decamped with his Sicilian-American friend to become a travel writer in Athens. She then moved in the late 1960s to "Swinging London" where she eventually married a trendy photographer known for his photos of the Beatles and such iconic American jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington - and helped rescue him from two misadventures. She traveled the world writing about places as diverse as Thailand, Kenya and Oman, became a pioneer in the promotion - via airlines and tourist boards - of transatlantic travel to the USA, launched the first UK travel magazines exclusively covering North America - today she remains the editor of "Essentially America" - and was elected the first American chairman of the British Guild of Travel Writers. Not only were there triumphs but also traumas ... some may make you laugh out loud.