Review of "Serendipity on Wheels" by Karen Shane

Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

Are you ready for a grand continent-hopping adventure?

Serendipity on Wheels by Karen Shane is one of the grandest travel memoirs of them all!

The book follows Karen & her husband, John, as they essentially travel the world—well, quite a bit of it. Together they turned retirement into excitement: a long-running experiment in curiosity, freedom, and reinvention. T

The book opens by grounding everything in their marriage and shared history, then moves through a series of adventure chapters involving rafting the Grand Canyon, piggybacking an RV across Copper Canyon in Mexico, extended travel in South Africa, life aboard a narrowboat in England, and years roaming the American West in a motorcoach. The through-line is not just travel, but the way John’s mechanical skill and calm problem-solving made their unusual life possible.

Other than the great sites and animals they encounter and experience, what we liked most is the portrait of marriage underneath the travel stories. Karen is often candid about being the more anxious or impulsive half, while John is the engineer, fixer, and stabilizer. That dynamic gives the memoir warmth. The dedication to John and the repeated focus on his ingenuity make the book read, in part, like a love letter to a husband who made an adventurous life possible. The ending note about flashing lights to a pilot and feeling grateful for the freedom they had been given lands because by then the reader understands that “freedom” is really the emotional subject of the whole memoir.

We also appreciated that this memoir is not trying to be artificially dramatic or overly literary. It is confident in what it is. Karen knows these stories are interesting. She knows the lifestyle is unusual. And she wisely lets the real-life predicaments, close calls, beautiful places, and relationship dynamics do the heavy lifting. That gives the book an easy, welcoming charm. You feel less like you are being lectured about travel and more like you are sitting across from a seasoned traveler hearing the best stories over lunch.

John, in particular, becomes one of the book’s secret weapons. Again and again, he is the guy solving problems, fixing vehicles, navigating absurd situations, and charging into difficult tasks with his memorable attitude of, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” That line alone tells you a lot about the energy of this book. It is adventurous, yes, but never in a hollow Instagram-inspirational way. It is adventurous in the real sense, where things go wrong, people have to improvise, and the trip becomes more memorable because of it.

We also found something quietly moving underneath all the travel. This is, in a very real sense, a love story. Not in a gushy or melodramatic way, but in the way long marriages sometimes become most beautiful through shared purpose, trust, and accumulated memories. Karen and John are not just seeing the world. They are building a life philosophy together. Retirement, in this book, is not framed as retreat. It is framed as expansion.

Ok, enough of the mushy stuff...

With that out of the way, let's get to what we REALLY enjoyed: the traveling and animal encounters!

Karen and John encounter a range of exotic creatures including elephants, giraffes, zebras, baboons, hippos, rhinos, crocodiles, ostriches, and more, and those sections add a real sense of wonder to the memoir. There is something especially fun about watching the book widen from American road-and-river adventure into full-on wildlife travel writing. Suddenly, this is not just about RVs, rails, and repairs. It is about being out in the world face-to-face with creatures and landscapes that feel almost mythic.

Their South African excursion seems to stand out for all the animals they see.

There are a lot of shenanigans involving all the silly monkeys who just show up whenever they want and take whatever they want.

They also see whales on the coast.

Also, thank you to Karen and Shane for giving readers a heads up about the unsavory aspects of each journey. For example, we didn't know that Rome was the pick-pocket capital of the world and that petty theft is such a problem there. We also didn't realize monkeys and snakes just show up at your camp in parts of Africa. That sounds both exciting and scary!

Check it out on Amazon!