What the heck kind of prepper sells everything she owns, shamelessly bribes her adult children, and hops on a plane to Europe grasping a one-way ticket and hauling with her only 2 suitcases and a backpack?

This one. Me. Right here. *waves*

You’d probably never meet me in line at the supermarket and think to yourself, "This chick should definitely be on my zombie apocalypse team." You’d see a middle aged mom with crazy hair, lots of tattoos, and an armload of bracelets who has stubbornly clung to the black-painted fingernails of my teenage Goth phase to this very day. I’ll tell anyone who stands still long enough about an adventure that occurred "when I lived in Mexico" or "this one time when I was living in Athens." Pretty much every minute of my midlife crisis has been a glorious free-spirited meander to exotic places.

And yet, even without the giant stockpile I always had to back me up, I think I’m better prepared to survive now than I was when I had 3 years of food stacked up, a mini-arsenal, a few acres of land, and a barn full of livestock.

There were still some lessons that I needed to learn.

I’ve prepped in settings from a drafty, wood-heated cabin in the Algonquin Forest in Canada, to a homestead in the mountains of Northern California, to a little apartment in the big city. I’ve learned to be prepared with very little in countries all over the world and how to make my way around unfamiliar places without getting murdered or trafficked. (So far, anyway.)

All of these things have made me a more versatile and better-prepared person. I have adapted so many times to so many settings that I have little doubt I can manage to adapt to more.

This book is probably quite different from any prepping or survivalism book you’ve read before. I hope that you don’t look at it and think that it’s just about travel. It’s not. This is NOT a travel book, nor is it a guide to nomadic prepping.

It’s about adaptability, situational awareness, skills, and being able to manage with the bare minimum of supplies. It’s about making decisions on the fly, then changing those decisions when it becomes (usually painfully) evident that they aren’t working.

It’s about modern survival in an ever-changing world.

And you? Well, you may not have any plans to hop on the next plane to Paris, but I hope that you can see where these lessons apply to you. Wherever you are and however you live, there are some things that remain constant in survival. You don’t have to be a world-traveler to see the value in flexibility, thinking on your feet, and solving problems with minimal supplies.