Jeff Appelquist, business lawyer turned consultant and Midwest Book Award-winning author, has traveled the globe since he graduated from Carleton College in 1980.
Uncle Sam underwrote his first foreign trip as a young Marine rifle-platoon lieutenant to South Korea and an island in the Indian Ocean.
Appelquist took copious notes as a traveler on subsequent trips fishing and diving off Mexico’s Pacific coast; climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa; pheasant hunting in South Dakota; touring Australia, Venice and elsewhere in Europe, as well as the wine country of California that has been devastated by droughts, fires and floods.
Appelquist’s latest book, “Changing Places,” is an irreverent, anecdotal and detailed travel memoir from Lake Superior to other continents, as well as a warning about damage wrought by climate change and what we can do about it. It ranges from picnic fare at the Santa Fe Opera, to diving with Appelquist and his daughter, Luci, on the Great Barrier Reef, to sampling vintages in Napa Valley.
And it explains why it’s important to wear two pairs of socks and tighten your boots when you descend Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro if you don’t want badly damaged feet.
The fit, 61-year-old former Marine who preached preparedness is still chagrined over that 2017 expedition. Appelquist describes in “Changing Places” the alarming rate Kilimanjaro’s ice caps are melting at, the loss of glacial water for those who depend on it and the rock slides freed by retreating ice. Once, during the several-day hike, the turf-hugging Appelquist and his climbing companions barely escaped injury as rocks zipped overhead like cannon fire.
The Book
Jeff Appelquist has traveled to all fifty of the United States, myriad foreign countries, and six continents. He has survived three years in the Marine Corps infantry; a violent rock slide on the Western Breach of Mount Kilimanjaro; a Force Nine gale in a sailboat on the Atlantic Ocean; a frozen regulator while wreck diving deep in icy Lake Superior; a precipitous mid-flight plunge aboard a commercial airliner; two earthquakes; numerous bodily injuries, concussions, and surgeries; and a ghostly encounter with a Confederate soldier on Little Round Top at Gettysburg. He is a student of history who teaches leadership. He is an international sportsman who loves the outdoors. And he is deeply concerned about the state of our beloved Earth.
In Changing Places, Appelquist journeys from the Great Barrier Reef of Australia to the highest mountaintop in Africa; from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to the Vatican City in Rome; from the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor to the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu; from the lush vineyards of Napa Valley to the rushing rivers of Montana to the fertile farmlands of rural Minnesota to the gorgeous waters off Key West, and many points in between. Changing Places is both an engaging travel memoir and a sobering treatise on the environment. Our world is a beautiful place, which Appelquist chronicles with a keen, loving eye and captivating storytelling. But it is also in danger: its coastlines, reefs, glaciers, rainforests, icecaps and species are vanishing before our eyes. In the end, Changing Places is a call to action for every person who cherishes the Planet Earth.
