Please check out this post from the innovative travel psychologist and travel writer Dr. Michael Brein and then support his new project on Kickstarter.

THE TRAVEL PSYCHOLOGIST E-BOOK SERIES
You wouldn’t believe the incredible stories people have told me about their travels!

Have you ever heard of the psychology of travel? Probably not, because I am the first one, I think, to coin this term, back in ’65. In fact, they almost threw me out of graduate school at the University of Hawaii when I told them that I came there to study the psychology of travel. “There’s no such thing as the psychology of travel,” said the two rat psychologists leering down at me. But I stood my ground, got my degree, followed my passion, and now I am ‘The Travel Psychologist’. But my God, what a monster I have created! Please read on…

What this is all about:

Imagine Forrest Gump running back and forth across the US simply because he liked to run! Passion and perseverance can lead to some very strange things, indeed! Read on. It’s hard to believe, what it is that I’ve done.

Over the last 35 years, while traveling the world, I’ve collected more than 5,000 fantastic travel tales told to me by at least 1,500 fellow world travelers and adventurers whom I’ve encountered around campfires, in pubs, in train stations, on safari, on cruise ships, on planes, chicken buses, transsiberian trains, and even on elephant back–in fact, I found people just about everywhere!

Right from the beginning, from getting people to promise to wait for me while I ran to get my bulky, unwieldy tape recorder, to a bit later, recording with a small micro-cassette recorder, and finally, in the modern era, to recording with digital voice recorders, I wheedled, pleaded, coaxed, cornered, wore down, obsessed, stalked, and finally managed to convince 100s and 100s of travelers to sit down with me for a bit so that I could record their stories.

Some I talked to for just a few minutes, some over days. And just this I did–over a period of nearly 35 years! Many thanks to my dear friends Steve Strickland and Megan Mitchell of BMSE (Body, Mind & Spirit Expos) out of Ashland, Oregon for providing, literally, this eccentric (ME!) enough booth space in many of their Expos up and down the west coast (and even Hawaii) to carve out my biggest chunk of interviews (about 300) in most recent years.

Travel-life in the raw–the good, bad, and the ugly:

All the while, I have been one of my own very best sources of travel tales too: I have been chased, robbed, mugged, menaced, scammed, conned, faced machine guns, been stalked by KGB, detained by US agents, as well as been leered at by lions, hippos, and buffaloes. I’ve been scared speechless, and, luckily, have had a few great escapes of my own.

I have tried all kinds of foods, drinks, and even a few dubious substances. But I have also liked, loved and formed phenomenal friendships nearly everywhere I’ve been. I have peered into the mystical, met gurus and saints, glimpsed the paranormal. In all, I have experienced the timelessness, the core, the essence, and perhaps even touched the very soul of travel. I have, indeed, lived the full, explored travel-life of my own.

Recorded these tales:

I meticulously recorded the good, the wonderful, the bad, the horrible, the incredible, the mystical, the close calls and great escapes, the confessions, the funniest, scariest, dangerous, most hair-raising and horrifying of travelers’ experiences as we’ve all meandered and traversed the globe.

Travel, not for the faint of heart:

These are not the meek tales of how travelers’ spent their summer vacations. Rather, they are the real down in the dirt travel-life trials and tribulations of travelers as they’ve faced life and death situations. Most have lived to tell their tales, and, sadly, some have not.

What’s different about them:

These are the tales that truly touch travelers’ souls. I searched, and searched even more, for the psychology behind travelers’ experiences. I probed how they got themselves into good situations, out of bad ones, and how they avoided the horrific altogether. I wanted to know what travelers thought and felt about what was happening to them right at the very instant they were in the thick of it. I wanted to know the shoulda, coulda, woulda–what would they have done differently. I probed at the deepest depths. And the moment I sensed even the slightest glimmer of something psychological, I relentlessly zeroed in on the travelers’ psyche, up close and very personal. Many have told me that my interviews were provocative and made them examine their own travels at a deeper level.

What a collection!:

The result is a phenomenal collection of travelers’ stories with an in-depth look at the core of the travel experience itself. The tales cover more than 200 themes and virtually every country in the world. Although collecting the stories was more than half the fun, it is now time to bring them out in the form of an e-book series–The Travel Psychologist Series–consisting of somewhere between 50 and 100 e-books, each one covering a different country, region or subject theme. You’ll see these e-books eventually on Kindle, the iBookstore, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and, hopefully, on your own laptops, desktops and mobile devices as well. E-books are booming! The time is now!

My e-books are designed to entertain and inform. If but one person avoids being pick-pocketed or worse, or forms a lasting friendship with a person of another culture, or has the time of his or her travel-life as a result of my efforts, then I will have succeeded. There is so much to share with the armchair adventurer or real-time traveler. I’ve had my fun amassing this unbelievable collection of travel tales and now it is time for me to make them public.

How I plan to do it:

I am systematically organizing my collection of travel tales into categories of countries, regions, and travel themes. From the Cold War Soviet Union & Eastern Europe, the Hippies & Drugs, Police & Jails, Saints, Miracle-Workers & Magicians, Cons & Scams, Safaris & Wildlife, Safety & Security, Close Calls & Great Escapes, the Best of Collection, and much, much more–in fact, nearly 200 categories! A collection of somewhere between 50 and 100 e-books will emerge.

I have the equivalent of nearly 600 micro-cassette tapes full of these tales, all of which have already been digitized into MP3 files. Approximately 1/3 of these files has already transcribed and I am currently already working with these stories as we speak.

What the money is for:

Simply stated, I am raising the money in order to have the 2/3 remaining digital files transcribed into a form that I can work with (Word documents). I have found a company in India that does excellent work at a very reasonable rate. Thus, I should be able to transcribe the rest of my material fairly efficiently and quickly, enabling me to complete my work on the series in about year or two.

To learn something more about ‘The Travel Psychologist e-Book Series’, please visit http://www.michaelbrein.com/. Select ‘Travel Tales’ and ‘The Travel Psychologist’ to get an idea of what I am doing. Be sure to look at ‘FAQ’ and ‘Themes’.

And who am I to be able to accomplish this?

Aside from having a relentless passion to do this, I am intelligent and very creative. All very well, you may be thinking. But have I actually done something? Can I really do this? You betcha! I’ve been very entrepreneurial in my life, having created some very good things, such as a successful dining, shopping, travel and entertainment discount card in Hawaii (The Epicure Card).

And I have created the world’s first and only travel guide series to sightseeing by public transportation. It is this guide series that I am proposing as a partial reward and thank you for your helping to fund The Travel Psychologist series. To learn more about this unique travel guide series, please visit http://www.michaelbrein.com/ (select ‘Travel Guides’).

What’s in it for you? Contribute, Participate, Pledge, and Share!

You, who are kind and generous enough to support me in this effort stand to gain as well. Could be you’ve had travels of your own. Maybe even you’ve wanted to write your own book. And perhaps you’ve learned that this may very well never be. I am doing The Travel Psychologist e-book series for both me and, in a sense, for you as well. If you can relate to and appreciate what I’m doing–and maybe participate in some small way–you can certainly share in various aspects as well.

At various PLEDGE levels for my project I will gift you with the following:

FREE digital and print copies of my unique travel guide series, “Michael Brein’s Travel Guides to Sightseeing by Public Transportation”;

FREE digital copies of the e-books in “The Travel Psychologist E-Book Series”;

A FREE consultation about your own travel-life with The Travel Psychologist (me!);

And, finally, for the Grand Patrons among you who may have a dream to collect your own travel experiences into a book–I’ll create and include a book of your own travel stories in The Travel Psychologist E-Book Series!

Thank you for considering my project!

Before you go:

WANTED! Have a few good travel tales to contribute to my e-books?
REWARD! I’ll gift you with a FREE copy as a ‘thank you!”