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All over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Geraldine DeRuiter (Author, Narrator), Hachette Audio (Publisher)
4.4 out of 5 stars 564 ratings

Some people are meant to travel the globe, to unwrap its secrets, and share them with the world. And some people have no sense of direction, are terrified of pigeons, and get motion sickness from tying their shoes. These people are meant to stay home and eat nachos. Geraldine DeRuiter is the latter. But she won't let that stop her. Hilarious, irreverent, and heartfelt, All over the Place chronicles the years Geraldine spent traveling the world after getting laid off from a job she loved. Those years taught her a great number of things, though the ability to read a map was not one of them. She has only a vague idea of where Russia is, but she now understands her Russian father better than ever before. She learned that what she thought was her mother's functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called "being Italian". She learned what it's like to travel the world with someone you already know and love - how that person can help you make sense of things and make far-off places feel like home. She learned about unemployment and brain tumors, lost luggage and lost opportunities, and just getting lost in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. And she learned that sometimes you can find yourself exactly where you need to be - even if you aren't quite sure where you are.

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  1. Listening Length
    8 hours and 29 minutes
  2. Author
    Geraldine DeRuiter
  3. Narrator
    Geraldine DeRuiter
  4. Audible release date
    2 May 2017
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Hachette Audio
  7. ASIN
    B071CFQWL8
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length 8 hours and 29 minutes
Author Geraldine DeRuiter
Narrator Geraldine DeRuiter
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com.au Release Date 02 May 2017
Publisher Hachette Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B071CFQWL8
Best Sellers Rank

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
564 global ratings

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Top reviews from Australia

  • Kim
    5.0 out of 5 stars Really enjoyed this book. A love story with some truly hilarious moments and a few tear-jerkers too
    Reviewed in Australia on 8 June 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Got through this in no time. Some laugh out loud moments interspersed with poignant anecdotes but at the end of the day a beautiful love story.
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  • E.P. Clark
    5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious Yet Insightful Travel Book
    Reviewed in Australia on 2 May 2017
    "All Over the Place" is a travel book, except that the travel is at least as much internal as it is external. Geraldine DeRuiter has transformed her popular blog, The Everywhereist, into a book that chronicles her trajectory from unemployment to travel blogger to brain-tumor-survivor to someone who's come to understand her family, her marriage, and herself. Well, at least a little bit better than she did before.

    As she freely admits at the beginning of the book, this isn't the kind of travel writing that explains to you how to save money in Sweden or avoid food poisoning in Fiji. Instead, it's the kind of travel writing where the trips serve as jumping-off points for musings on the meaning of life. If that sounds heavy, stuffy, or boring, it's not: DeRuiter's zany sense of humor comes bubbling out irrepressibly at every juncture, whether she's describing her mother's attempt to bring a pickax through airport security shortly after 9/11 (I may have cried a little during that scene, I laughed so hard), or the difficulties she and her husband face to preserve the happy state of their marriage under the pressure of her recovery from brain surgery and his inhumanly long work hours. There are also stories of her semi-successful attempts to understand her parents, both immigrants to the US, by returning to their original or adopted hometowns in Italy and Germany, as well as various alcohol-fueled bathroom mishaps in restaurants and hotels. Although the madcap adventures are presented in non-chronological order, the book's trajectory traces a gentle arc from 20-something Geraldine's neuroses to 30-something Geraldine's slightly calmer and more accepting approach to life, as she comes to the important realization that getting lost is not the worst thing that can happen to you, and sometimes it might take you where you really need to go. In turns heartwarming and hilarious, "All Over the Place" is one of the best travel books I've read in a long time.

    My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
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  • Melanie
    5.0 out of 5 stars Entspannt und heiter
    Reviewed in Germany on 20 January 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Fröhliche Vergleiche und nette Passagen. Das Buch macht Lust zu reisen! Habe mehrfach gute Stellen laut vorgelesen. Inhaltlich wird man aber über Urlaubsländern nichts erfahren, aber man bekommt Lust einfach trotzdem draufloszufahren. Nettes Buch, keine schwere Kost.
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Witty Love Ode
    Reviewed in Canada on 31 May 2020
    Verified Purchase
    I've been reading Geraldine's blog for some time so I was really happy when she published this book, but for the longest time, I couldn't buy it for a reasonable price in Canada until recently. It's written in the same sharp, humorous, self-deprecating and charming way as her blog. I found it to be a loving ode to her husband Rand, which was sweet, but she didn't make it over the top! Hope she writes more books.
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  • B. Adams
    5.0 out of 5 stars A book about life
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 May 2017
    Verified Purchase
    There's a passage fairly early on in this book where Geraldine talks about how her husband has made her want to be a better person. The way she worded it, somehow it resonated with me on a profound level. She managed to describe exactly how I feel about my wife and how I've become a better man because I want to have earned my wife's affections.

    This book is full of such moments. Geraldine has a special relationship with words; she writes the way a heart feels. Every chapter is a delight, a series of emotional peaks and instantly relatable moments. And the best thing about this book is that it's probably the funniest I've read in a very very long time - I think only Iain Banks's 'Raw Spirit' surpasses this in the laughs-to-words ratio.

    It's billed as a travel book, but it's actually a book about life itself. Reading it is an act of self-enrichment. You'll be a poorer person for skipping this one.
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  • Peter Meyers
    5.0 out of 5 stars Improbably, Absolutely, Entirely True
    Reviewed in the United States on 1 September 2017
    Verified Purchase
    I could tell you that this book was hilarious and heartwarming, but that much has already been said so much better by so many others whose literary gifts extend beyond believing alliteration is terribly clever. So, instead, I’d like to tell you a story, which, having just finished “All Over The Place” minutes ago, seems like the only appropriate way to express my own feelings on the matter.

    I was travelling to Portland for an event in honor of a friend whose parents had been brutally murdered. I realize that’s a terrible beginning to a story, but life has never read any of the hundreds of books telling it exactly how stories are supposed to be written (sadly, I have, and life has made the right choice on this particular point).

    This friend and I were mutual friends with Geraldine and Rand. Geraldine is, to painfully oversimplify, my boss’s wife. This is a relationship that generally consists of nodding politely at Christmas parties and trying not to drink too much and embarrass yourself. I’ve since found that trying not to embarrass yourself in front of Geraldine is almost entirely antithetical to her nature, but that’s yet another story.

    Somehow, it was decided that I should fly to Seattle (the only part of the next couple of days that made any practical sense, Seattle being our main office) and a group of us would drive up to Portland and return the next day. I pictured 3-4 of us in a sensible rental car, a solemn event, and a return the next morning to dutifully get as much work done as possible.

    The sensible rental car turned out to be a cargo van – the exact kind of van that children are specifically instructed not to get into when approached by a stranger. While not by strangers, it would not be entirely inaccurate to say that I was abducted.

    The next morning, instead of returning to the office, we stopped, in typical Portland fashion, for donuts and coffee on the way to breakfast. Being a native Midwesterner, this confuses me, as donuts and coffee are often the entire scope of our breakfast and do not lead immediately to another breakfast. Somewhere along the way, the three of us also became 11, including almost the entire executive team of our company.

    All of this took an unacceptably long time, as eating all of your meals twice sometimes does, and so naturally we decided to make a quick stop at Geraldine’s mother’s house, which exists not so much on the way between Portland and Seattle as in a pocket dimension that may only be summoned under certain conditions beyond my comprehension. I suspect that the van was our TARDIS, and my abduction occurred across both space and time.

    I only met Geraldine’s mother for the space of 15 minutes of normal, human time, in a house that was somehow a village, and at a time that was somehow perpetually both Halloween and Christmas. There were decorations for both and neither, and, without knowing why, that seemed right and proper. I met Melba the mannequin, who is inexplicably charming, and experienced a lifetime in a quarter-hour.

    You may be wondering how any of this is helping you to decide whether to spend $15 on this book. You may also suspect that I’m simply trying to name-drop my limited time with Geraldine so that she remembers me when she inevitably becomes famous. You wouldn’t be completely wrong.

    The point of all of this, though, is that this book is not simply hilarious and heartwarming. It is also – and I can say this with total confidence from a single road trip – absolutely and completely true. Not a single word is exaggerated, from hand grenades to unspeakable toilet incidents to desperately important boring clocks, and that makes it all the more magical.
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  • Amazon カスタマー
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great read
    Reviewed in Japan on 23 January 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Geraldine is great on Twitter and on her blog as well, but this book was just as good. It was a fun read and I’m looking forward to her next project.
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