Making It Home: My Year As a Middle-Aged Runaway

Have you ever wanted to "run away" for a while? Where would you go? How would you live life differently? In the year she turned 50, Liz Moore acted on a long-time daydream. She loaded up her car and left home for a year. Her goal was to randomly find a nice town far away, move in, get a job, and live life without a plan and away from all things familiar. After a month to two months, it would be time to leave for the next town and a new set of adventures, until she had completed a tour of America. She had not imagined where the roads would lead: to work "in security" at the lip of the Grand Canyon, and fun in the concrete canyons of New York, to sharing a house with a globe-trotting professor, to over-coming chaos in a New England waitressing job. "Making it home" refers to making each town home for the time she was there. "Making it home" also means rushing home to deal with crises, including a devastating betrayal and family tragedy.

Born in Independence, Kansas, Liz Moore is a journalism graduate of Kansas State University whose first career spanned 10 years of award-winning reporting, editing and photography for daily and weekly newspapers in Kansas and in Texas. She moved herself to Texas, and her professional life to non-profit public relations, affording her a swell condominium in a suburb of Fort Worth and eventually, two cats in her household instead of just one. Liz also lived in Washington, D.C., for five years. Weary of cities, and having finally finished this book, Liz chose her next phase of life, back to the small town. Since 2008, she has lived in the town of her birth and pre-college schooling, Independence. She is the executive director of Independence Main Street, a program of preserving the charms of a historic downtown and supporting its economic vitality.