I think I must have found this used paperback down at the little store....it's a little dog-gnawed, so I don't think it could have come from Kona Bay Books. It was engrossing: the tale of a 25 year old woman who leaves NYC with her 6 year old son to bum around parts unknown. She had a big vocabulary...I must have looked up 15 words, including synaethesia ( the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body); assegai (a slender, iron-tipped, hardwood spear used chiefly by southern African peoples); autochthonous (of an inhabitant of a place, indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists); and steatopygous (extreme accumulation of fat on and about the buttocks, especially of women).

"In traveling, there are certain chance moments when you seem to cross a boundary. The familiar and the commonplace drop away that you are assailed by a sense of purest wonder, and are overtaken with delight by the immediacy of the moment itself and by the knowledge of retrospective pleasure that will be distilled from it."

Passed along to Maddie