This section, Adventures, is all about curiosity.

When I was young–at school, or later when I worked in an office–I always hated being cooped up behind a desk in some musty classroom or conference room, listening to someone endlessly droning on about dates and places or facts and figures, or making me perform yet another forgettable exam or presentation. I could never figure out what any of that had to do with anything interesting.

I always preferred to be out-of-doors, skiing or hiking over a mountain. My favorite was climbing up into a tree, where I could imagine that I was atop the mast of a big ship, sailing off somewhere, anywhere at all — like in one of those swashbuckling pirate-adventure novels. Which I still love so much that I actually write them myself!

My favorite Robert Louis Stevenson poem, Foreign Lands, just about sums it up:

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad in foreign lands…

If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships…