Books
Sally Bond's Books
Sally Bond wrote two books across two decades, each one a record of a different season of her remarkable life. Both are available on Amazon. The audiobook edition of Travel Adventures for the Leisure Class is available directly through this website.
Goin' To Weather: Sailing Through the
Headwinds of Life
2014
Memoir
Goin’ To Weather is Sally Bond’s first memoir, and it remains one of the most honest accounts of a life built on personal philosophy and physical determination. The title draws from the sailing term for driving a racing boat hard and efficiently directly into a headwind. It was the principle by which Sally navigated everything.
The book begins in a small Iowa town during the Great Depression and moves chronologically through Sally’s childhood, her family’s move to California in the 1950s, her coming of age, her marriage, her foray into motherhood, and the devastating loss of her young son Rex. It traces her path through grief toward the competitive athletic life that became her anchor: sailboat racing along the Southern California coast with her son Bob, marathon running, skiing, and ultimately the IronMan Triathlon in Kona, Hawaii, where she finished third in her age group at the age of fifty.
Sally weaves American history throughout the narrative, drawing on the extensive reading she undertook to build the vocabulary and the intellectual framework to write the book she wanted to write. The result is an unusually rich personal memoir: one part athletic memoir, one part political and historical reflection, and entirely the story of a woman who refused to be defined by her circumstances.
Travel Adventures for the Leisure Class: An In-Depth Look at Countries around the World
2025
Travel Memoir
Travel Adventures for the Leisure Class is the account of Sally Bond’s second great chapter. With the mountains, triathlons, and sailboat races of her earlier life behind her, Sally and her husband Walt turned their energy and curiosity toward the world. What followed was more than two decades of international exploration, documented with the same intellectual rigor and personal warmth that defined her first book.
The book spans twenty-one chapters and five continents. It opens in Hawaii, where Sally and Walt camped along Maui’s Road to Hana, hiked to the Seven Sacred Pools, and stumbled upon Charles Lindbergh’s grave among the banyan trees near Heavenly Hana. It moves through the Pacific Northwest and then, at Walt’s gentle suggestion, into international territory: New Zealand, Australia, Western Europe, Asia, the Far East, South America, Antarctica, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Colorado. Sally traveled not as a passive tourist but as an active historian, reading and researching each destination before arrival and writing about it with the depth of someone who understood that travel is, above all, an education.
They traveled primarily on small expedition cruise ships, which Sally describes with characteristic precision. She notes the one-to-one passenger-to-staff ratio, the expert lectures, the absence of lines, the elegance of on-board dining, and the particular pleasure of having a hotel room that traveled with you. It is practical travel writing elevated by personal reflection and genuine historical curiosity.
TRIBUTE
Sally did not live to see this book published. Her husband Walt, who traveled every mile of these adventures beside her, who first put a challenging book in her hands and encouraged her to write, completed the manuscript after her passing. It was published in 2025. Copyright J. W. Bond.
Book collections
