Brad Newsham (born September 15, 1951) is a travel writer from San Francisco, US. His books include Take Me With You in which he travels across the Philippines, India, Egypt and Kenya with the intention of taking one person whom he meets on his travels back to America with him, and All The Right Places. Life Born the second of four children in Washington, D.C., Newsham grew up in Alexandria, Virginia with his parents. His father was a CIA cartographer and both parents were Christian Scientists. As a boy of limited academic aptitude he was sent to the Christian Scientist Principia Upper School in St. Louis, Missouri, before attending Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, where he gained a degree in history and sociology in 1972. After a brief spell as an asphalt paver and then the driver for a touring concert harpist, he spent seven months touring Morocco, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan in 1973. For the following eight years he worked as a dishwasher, school bus driver, construction worker, waiter, underground molybdenum miner, and small town newspaper reporter in Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona. In 1977, he built a log house in Idaho, with two friends to whom he later sold his share. Newsham married his first wife, Beverly, in 1980 and spent six months travelling around the world visiting Hong Kong, Thailand, India, USSR, and Greece in 1982. Upon their return the couple moved to San Francisco, where he became a secretary at Wells Fargo Bank. The marriage ended in 1984 and Newsham traveled to Japan, China, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad before spending nine months writing about the journey. In 1985 he first drove a taxicab—a job he has continued part-time ever since. Random House published All the Right Places, the story of his Trans-Siberian adventure, in 1989. In the same year he took his third trip around the world and subsequently wrote his second book, Take Me With You. The manuscript was completed in 1993 but it was rejected by a score of publishers. In 1995 Newsham married Rhonda Gillenwaters, and they had a daughter in 1996. Take Me With You was published by Travellers' Tales in 2000 and released in paperback by Ballantine (US) and Bantam (UK) in 2002. In summer 2001 he received Philippine rice farmer Tony Tocdaan, whom he had met in 1988, as a guest in his San Francisco home. They then spent a month