Pink Shoe Tours is San Francisco’s premier provider of walking tours geared towards the thoughtful, experiential traveler. Our philosophy is that the best way to get to know a city is to get off the tour bus and walk the streets!

Join San Francisco Travel Lit & Lectures on Saturday, March 24th when members will enjoy a rare treat – a custom walking tour introducing you to San Francisco’s historic North Beach neighborhood! (Italians invented La Passeggiata – “the art of the stroll” – so what better place to take a walking tour than this celebrated neighborhood infused with Italian charm and heritage?)

Whether you’re a Bay Area newcomer or a seasoned SF denizen, there’s always more to learn about this district – a true gem that is one of the most exciting and fun filled areas of The City. Led by Pink Shoe Tours Founder Laurie Koski, you’ll enjoy an informative and entertaining 90 minute walking tour filled with history, fun facts and trivia and tips on the best places to eat, drink and shop. After the tour you’ll be free to wrap up your perfect Saturday morning stroll with a leisurely lunch at one of North Beach’s numerous restaurants and cafes.

*Please note: So that each participant can get the most out of this tour, we will be limiting the group size so RSVP soon to reserve your space!*

About Your Guide:
Laurie Koski is the Founder and President of Pink Shoe Tours. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Laurie has long been passionate about the history of her beloved home town and believes that the best way to get to know the real San Francisco is to get off the tour bus and walk its historic streets.

Laurie loves that each neighborhood offers new and surprising discoveries and enjoys sharing the hidden gems and undiscovered corners of each unique district during her informative tours. A devoted scholar of all things SF, Laurie is well versed in Bay Area history and culture, culling her knowledge from history books, travelogues, contemporary blogs and memoirs alike.

An avid world traveler, Laurie is always planning her next global adventure but while home she remains a loyal Giants and 49ers fan, rooting from her home in the historic North Beach neighborhood.

DETAILS AND RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/events/54257482/

Join SF Travel Lit & Lectures for our April Travel Book Club meeting on Wednesday, April 4th when we will be discussing Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff by Rosemary Mahoney!

From Amazon.com:
When Rosemary Mahoney, in 1998, took a solo trip down the Nile in a seven-foot rowboat, she discovered modern Egypt for herself. As a rower, she faced crocodiles and testy river currents; as a female, she confronted deeply-held beliefs about foreign women while cautiously remaining open to genuine friendship; and, as a traveler, she experienced events that ranged from the humorous to the hair-raising–including an encounter that began as one of the most frightening of her life and ended as an edifying and chastening lesson in human nature and cultural misunderstanding. Whether she’s meeting Nubians and Egyptians, or finding connections to Westerners who traveled up the Nile in earlier times–Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert among them–Mahoney’s informed curiosity about the world never ceases to captivate the reader.

DETAILS AND RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/events/46344312/

Join SF Travel Lit and Lectures for our May travel book club meet up when we will be discussing Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea by Eric Hansen!

From Amazon.com:
In 1978 Eric Hansen found himself shipwrecked on a desert island in the Red Sea. When goat smugglers offered him safe passage to Yemen, he buried seven years’ worth of travel journals deep in the sand and took his place alongside the animals on a leaky boat bound for a country that he’d never planned to visit.

As he tells of the turbulent seas that stranded him on the island and of his efforts to retrieve his buried journals when he returned to Yemen ten years later, Hansen enthralls us with a portrait — uncannily sympathetic and wildly offbeat — of this forgotten corner of the Middle East. With a host of extraordinary characters from his guide, Mohammed, ever on the lookout for one more sheep to squeeze into the back seat of his car, to madcap expatriates and Eritrean gun runners- and with landscapes that include cities of dreamlike architectural splendor, endless sand dunes, and terrifying mountain passes, Hansen reveals the indelible allure of a land steeped in custom, conflicts old and new, and uncommon beauty.

DETAILS AND RSVP AT: http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/events/46346482/

Join the SF Travel Lectures Series on Wednesday, May 16th when we will welcome Conner Gorry direct from Cuba!

About Conner Gorry:
Author of over a dozen Lonely Planet guides, Conner Gorry’s first foreign adventure was to Vieques at age 8. A formative experience in the truest sense of the word, that trip ignited a fascination with Latin America that, three decades on, is a way of life. Indeed: since 2002, Conner has been based in Havana, Cuba, writing about what living on the island is really like.

A native New Yorker, Conner first went to Cuba as a volunteer in 1993 and relocated to Havana to report on the Cuban health system for Oakland-based MEDICC Review. She is the only American journalist to have reported on Cuban doctors in settings as diverse as post-disaster Pakistan and Haiti, the barrios of Caracas, and the Honduran Mosquito Coast. Following the harrowing earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, Conner was posted with Cuban disaster relief doctors to report on their work in the NWFP and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, an experience that served as precursor to her month-long posting with the Cuban relief team in Port-au-Prince following the earthquake in Haiti.

Conner honed her writing chops churning out features for the San Francisco Chronicle and others before landing on Lonely Planet’s roster, when the real adventures began. She has written guides on post civil war Guatemala and post 9-11 NYC; hiked Big Island volcanoes and careened down Bolivia’s (and the world’s) “most dangerous road;” and kayaked the Na Pali Coast and picked along Cuba’s secret beaches. Every new travel experience informs her work including the Lonely Planet guide to the Big Island (Hawai’i), Guatemala Great Destinations, and Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 – all available in bookstores now. Recent assignments include Cuba content for PBS, BBC, New York Magazine, and Scientific American.

Her blog, Here is Havana, is continuously updated despite a laborious 48kbp dial up connection, and in 2010, Conner launched Havana Good Time – the top-rated Havana travel iApp on iTunes and the only one written and maintained from Cuba. She is currently finishing a book chronicling contemporary life on the island – including her own.

For details of Conner’s work, including clips, see www.connergorry.com and www.hereishavana.wordpress.com.

Join the SF Travel Book Club on Wednesday, June 6th when we will be discussing Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier!

From Amazon.com:
In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region’s fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia’s role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we’ll never think about it in the same way again.

With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia’s most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.

Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the “amazingness” of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century’s indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.

DETAILS AND RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/events/57456282/

Join the SF Travel Book Club on Wednesday, July 11th when we will discuss On the Road by Jack Kerouac!

From Publishers Weekly:
Fans of Kerouac get the whole beautiful, groovy deal with this new recording of the radically hip novel that many consider the heart of the Beat movement. Poetic, open and raw, Kerouac’s prose lays out a cross-country adventure as experienced by Sal Paradise, an autobiographical character. A writer holed up in a room at his aunt’s house, Paradise gets inspired by Dean Moriarty (a character based on Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady) to hit the road and see America. From the moment he gets on the seven train out of New York City, he takes the reader through the highs and lows of hitchhiking, bonding with fellow explorers and opting for beer before food. First published in 1957, Kerouac’s perennially hot story continues to express the restless energy and desire for freedom that makes people rush out to see the world. The tale is only improved by Dillon’s well-paced, articulate reading as he voices the flow of images and graveled reality of Paradise’s search for the edge.

DETAILS AND RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/events/57457352/

Join SF Travel Lit & Lectures on Tuesday, July 24th when we will welcome a panel of speakers from Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Women’s Travel Writing of 2012! Editor Lavinia Spalding will be joined by several BWTW contributors for a not-to-be-missed event!

DETAILS AND RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/events/57456622/

Come see Jeff speak.  He’s awesome.  Don’t miss it. 

RSVP Here:  http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/

Join SF Travel Lit & Lectures on Wednesday, May 4th for our next Travel Book Club meeting when we will be discussing The Places In Between by Rory Stewart!

RSVP Here:  http://www.meetup.com/SF-Travel-Book-Club-and-Lecture-Series/events/15623944/