Thanks to a mother with travel lust, Mary Walker Clark has been on the road for vacations since grade school, leaving behind her small Panhandle town of Plainview, Texas, bound for destinations in the United States. After a ten-week trip to Europe in 1969 with her mother and brothers and a green Volkswagen van, she began traveling the world. Since she retired as an attorney, these explorations have expanded to six continents, landing her in tents in Morocco, canoes in Ecuador, amongst the tribes of Nagaland and hiking in Bhutan.
Mary’s stories are vignettes of life in the world. She doesn’t promote a destination, only places you there with its history, ambiance, and uniqueness. She plans her own trips, and her husband joins her on occasion. But she is grateful to have girlfriends who are up for just about any journey, proving Mary’s theory on a small scale that women are more adventuresome than men.
In 2017, Mary traveled to India and China to retrace her father’s WWII footsteps of flying over the Hump (Himalaya Mountains) from India to China. This journey was the culmination of her sometimes painful search to bring back her father’s memories lost when he died unexpectedly at 49 and is the story she tells in Landing in My Present.
Paris, Texas is home, with regular jaunts to Oklahoma and Georgia to visit five grandsons. Mary is happiest on the back roads of a new country, visiting over a perfect cappuccino, or immersed in a well-written history book.
Many of Mary’s years of travel writings are available on her blog , Mary Clark, Traveler, and in podcast form with the NPR station, KETR, 90.1, KETR Podcasts for Mary Walker Clark She is an award winning member of the North American Travel Journalists Association and has been published in the Paris News, the North America Travel Journalists Association online magazine and the anthology, Still Me After All These Years.
