What do you do when you realize the life you've spent seventeen years creating isn't the life you want? An intense and serendipitous relationship spurs a workaholic professional to confront this very question as she approaches the mirror of age forty. The answer author Dana Atkinson finds leads her on a surprising journey into herself, and into the heart of a continent of which she has only dreamed. What she finds is a self she has never met, and a home she has never known. "I had not only lost myself in my career, but was letting life quickly slip away," she says. "One day as I was updating my business resume I came to wonder what a personal resume would look like should I try to write one. I never got past a blank page. That was the moment I knew things had to change." When Dana Atkinson abruptly left her corporate career in 2001, she was Director of Field Sales for a toy and gift company. Domestic Departures is her first book, the result of three and a half years of intense traveling and writing. Her travels in Africa continue to be a passion, driving her writing career as she now works on her forth book on the subject.