Beyond the Bright Lights: When Luxury Was Prime: A Travelogue in Time

Beyond the Bright Lights is a non-fiction travelogue covering four once-in-a lifetime trips outside the United States, derived from, and coinciding with, the author’s documented travel journals depicting her life in Australia with her parents, as a teenager, from 1957-59, and concluding with a third trip to Australia with her husband, for the Sydney Olympics in 2000. As a teen, Funk lived in Australia for over two years, attending high school there. Two subsequent trips to the same area, with her husband and son gave her a bird’s eye view of changes that had taken place over the years. Between those trips, she and her husband traveled to the Oktoberfest, in Munich, Germany. With an aversion to tours offered by guides and such, Funk and her parents (in Australia) and her husband (in Germany) chose to get down with the people of the lands they visited versus looking down on them from a tour bus or tour guide’s perspective.