Meeting Strangers, Making Friends: More Surprising Travel Adventures from the Minnesota Story Teller

Tom Mattson grew up in Biwabik, Minnesota. After receiving his Juris Doctor from the University of Minnesota, he spent years -- punctuated by sabbaticals for travel -- advocating on cases ranging from family law, price-fixing, fires, and explosions, to the death penalty and nuclear bomb cleanup and compensation. Tom has enjoyed a parallel career -- an ad hoc one that has its seeds in the Chevy and Greyhound explorations. He's ridden atop railroad boxcars in California, took the controls of a Peruvian locomotive, crawled through a Bolivian silver mine, and was hauled off in a Mexican police car for a Saturday night in the infamous Tijuana jail. He now divides his time between his Minnesota abode near Biwabik on a lake named Lost, his tin-roofed shack in the Guatemala mountains of the Maya people, and motorcycling the American and Canadian West -- and re-visiting friends in some of the 75 countries he's experienced. For more information about Tom, you can check out tomsglobe.com.