Rick Antonson is the author of Route 66 Still Kicks: Driving America's Main Street which The New York Times called "One of the best books of the bunch" in their 2012 Christmas travel book roundup, and To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey Through West Africa (2013) which the Chicago Tribune noted as a "travel classic." The former CEO of Tourism Vancouver, an Ambassador for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, chair of Destination Marketing Association International (based in Washington, DC), former deputy chair of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (based in Bangkok, Thailand), and president of Pacific Coast Public Television, Antonson now writes full time concentrating on a forthcoming novel and a new travel memoir, Full Moon Over Noah's Ark: An Odyssey to Mount Ararat (Skyhorse, NY, Spring 2016).