Bill Goodwin's Travel Guides

And I bought half a sailboat, which became my ticket to Tahiti. Not my first boat, but Felicity, a 41-foot yawl my friend Paul Woodard and I purchased with the intention of sailing around the world. We managed not to kill each other before reaching Tahiti in 1977, where I left Felicity in Paul's capable hands.

A girlfriend and I stayed in French Polynesia until the gendarmes insisted we depart, then backpacked through American Samoa, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia, India, and Europe on a most enjoyable version of our own circumnavigation.

After living most of 1984 in Hawaii, I devised a plan to return to paradise without paying for it—or so I thought—by writing Frommer's South Pacific. Paul Pasmantier, Arthur Frommer's brother-in-law who was then publisher of the guidebooks, bought the idea. I spent a year researching and writing the first edition in 1986-87 and have religiously revised and updated 10 more editions since then. My eleventh edition was published in 2008.

In 2006 we published the first edition of Frommer's Tahiti & French Polynesia, and in 2008 we brought out the new Frommer's Fiji.

I added Frommer's Virginia to my list of credits in the 1990s, and for several years I was co-author of Frommer's Florida.