Brave-Ish: One Breakup, Six Continents, and Feeling Fearless After Fifty

Lisa Niver is an award-winning travel writer who has been to more than one hundred countries and created the top ranked travel website, WeSaidGoTravel.com. She’s had adventures in far-off locales from Vanuatu to Nepal—but what people don’t realize is that this came from the ashes of an abusive marriage.

After finding herself lying on a sidewalk, looking up at the sky in severe pain after being physically attacked by her husband in Thailand, Lisa Niver finally found the courage to leave her marriage behind at forty-seven years old and set course on a new life. Feeling like a failure, pushing fifty, and moving home to her parents’ house to start again from scratch, she started taking one tiny “brave-ish” step at a time to take her life far away from the old one and into the world of travel writing. These small hurdles ultimately led to the challenge of trying fifty new things before turning fifty.

From diving into shipwrecks to bobsledding at 3 Gs to wild nights with inappropriate men, Lisa found herself all across the globe on a journey of reinvention and discovering what it actually means to be “brave” and proving that you can always start again and create an adventurous new life while swimming with sharks, jumping out of planes, making friends all over the world, and living life on your own terms.

Although Brave-ish eventually takes readers to dozens of locations including Aruba, Cuba, Scotland, Monaco, China, the Solomon Islands, and Kenya, it is much more than a travelogue. Lisa illustrates to the reader that you can always begin again, even when you feel anything but brave.