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  • Peking to Paris

  • Life and Love on a Short Drive Around Half the World
  • By: Dina Bennett
  • Narrated by: Katherine Dyer
  • Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (7 ratings)

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Peking to Paris cover art

Peking to Paris

By: Dina Bennett
Narrated by: Katherine Dyer
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Editorial reviews

Dina Bennett is a worrywart with a penchant for daydreaming - the combination of which landed her on the 35-day Peking to Paris Motor Challenge with her husband, Bernard, and a trunk full of anxiety. Bennett's worries and flights of fancy come alive in Katherine Dyer's spirited narration, which charmingly captures the young woman's formative moments (including the first time she walked, and how she fell in love with her dashing French husband) up to the 7,800-mile car race that could conceivably ruin her marriage. Funny, emotional, and transformative, Peking to Paris: Life and Love on a Short Drive Around Half the World is a travel story that will charm even the most reluctant armchair adventurer.

Publisher's Summary

In this thrilling road trip from "Peking to Paris", a woman tries to save her car, her marriage, and her confidence from breaking down.

In May 2007, leaving China’s Great Wall is Car 84, one of 128 antique autos racing in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. It’s guided by one Dina Bennett, the world’s least likely navigator: a daydreamer prone to carsickness, riddled with self-doubt, and married to a thrill-seeking perfectionist who is half-human, half-racecar. What could possibly go wrong?

Funny, self-deprecating, and marred by only a few acts of great fortitude, Peking to Paris is first and foremost a voyage of transformation. The listener is swept on a wild, emotional ride, with romance and adversity, torment and triumph. Starting in Beijing, Dina and her husband, Bernard, limp across the Gobi, Siberia, Baltic States, and south to Paris in a 1940 Cadillac LaSalle, while Dina nurses the absurd hope that she can turn herself into a person of courage and patience.

Writing for every woman who’s ever doubted herself and any man who’s wondered what the woman traveling with him is thinking, Dina brings the reader with her as she deftly sidesteps rock-throwing Mongolians and locks horns with Russians left over from the Interpol era - not to mention getting a sandstorm facial and racing rabbits on a curvy country road. Come along for the ride with a dashboard diva!

©2013 Dina Bennett (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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Armchair travel at its best

This is an enjoyable read, thank f you are like me and always looking for stories that are from the perspective of an older women you will be delighted.

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