When Your Heart Says Go: My Year of Traveling Beyond Loss and Loneliness

What sort of mad longing besets a womannearing fifty and recently widowedto sell everything she owns, buy an around-the-world airline ticket, pack a single suitcase, and set off alone on a year-long journey without a plan or agenda? When Your Heart Says Go answers that question.

Set in 199091, Judys story takes readers from San Diego through eleven European countries, the then-Soviet Union, and finally India, during the lead-up to the first Gulf War.

Explorations of foreign locales and interactions with strangers and acquaintances who become a lifeline to friendship are interspersed with occasional flashbacks to Judys life with her beloved husband, Tom, as well as his illness and death. Descriptions of sites historic and current serve as both daily life and background for Judys struggle to find her way as a sober, single, independent woman in the vast world as it edges toward the collapse of the Soviet Union and war in the Middle East. The outer journey serves as a container for the inner; the more Judy experiences of the world, the more she learns about herselfand the closer she gets to realizing her lifelong dream of being a writer. See more