I Married a Travel Junkie

When he married for the second time, Jay Keyser thought he and his wife would settle down on a bucolic little farm in Massachusetts, a place where the cows meet the sea. That was before he found out the awful truth: he had married a travel junkie. While he was envisioning walks along quiet beaches, hand in hand at end of day, her sights were set on stakeouts beside the Grumeti River in Tanzania watching crocodiles take down a baboon. He didn’t want to come within six thousand miles of a crocodile, let alone six feet. But, somehow, he couldn’t let Nancy go it alone. And so, for the past fifteen years, Jay Keyser has followed his wife around this treacherous world. I Married a Travel Junkie is his chronicle. A natural born lemonade-maker, our reluctant traveler did his level best to understand not only the extraordinary people and places he visited, but his own internal conflict. As he studied his anxiety across the course of seven terrifying trips to Africa, from the Serengeti National Park to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, he gradually began to accept the profound differences between his wife and himself. Although terrified by them, he has learned from his experiences, most especially from an encounter with an angry female gorilla, who offered key insight into marriage and human nature. Jay Keyser learned to stop and smell the elephant dung.