Same Road, Different Paths - Hardcover

by Michael E. Petrie (Author)

The Wonder Years, Forrest Gump, Yellowstone, Adventures in Paradise, Daisy Jones & the Six...all rolled up into one amazingly true-life adventure.

A product of 1960s suburban Chicago, Michael Perry is the daydreaming son of a philandering father with little patience or interest in parenting. His is a childhood spent desperately seeking a father's love and acceptance, yet seemingly failing at every attempt. Ultimately abandoning his father's world, he ventures out to search for love and a sense of meaning to his life.

Hitchhiking across the Great American Southwest at age seventeen, finding refuge in unexpected places-from a desert commune in Colorado to a Navajo Indian Reservation-his journey takes him to the fast-paced risky life of a rodeo cowboy, and winds through California's music scene... falling in and out of love along the way.

Discovering a passion for the ocean, he becomes a seagoing vagabond, abandoning life on the mainland, sailing a small sailboat across the Pacific to the South Sea Islands-living his own version of "Adventures in Paradise"-until meeting a fiercely independent woman who completely captures his heart. But their future together is sorely tested by the heartbreak of infertility, further rupturing the fragments of emotional shrapnel from his own father. It is only years later, when his father is elderly, that reconciliation with the man for whom he had long sought acceptance becomes possible.

Told with honesty and emotional depth, and based upon a true story, this coming-of-age adventure novel reminds us that while the paths we take may diverge, the road home is always within reach.