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Gina Greenlee is a Manhattan native, writer and world traveler of 32 years. She began traveling independently at age 14 when in 1974, she spent a summer in Germany with friends of her parents.

During her teens and 20s, Gina visited more than 20 Caribbean islands and in 1992, worked on a Royal Caribbean cruise as a shipboard lecturer. That same year, she relocated from Maryland to northern California to troubleshoot for a major client on behalf of Johnson & Johnson, her employer at the time. Driving 300 miles a day in a rental car for four months, Gina lived and worked on the road. On weekends, she leveraged her short-term relocation into exploration of some of California's most breathtaking landscapes from Carmel and Tiburon to Yosemite and Lake Tahoe.

When Gina returned to Maryland in April 1992, she started packing for a one-year relocation to Singapore to represent Johnson & Johnson in a joint venture with the Singapore government. Her home base in Southeast Asia made travel to Thailand, Malaysia and India as accessible as a daily commute.

Once back in the U.S. in 1993, Gina assumed a position with a Connecticut-based company and continued to travel overseas, and domestically, at least once a year for the next six years. But the richness of her expatriate life in Asia had caused a yearning for deeper journeys. So she reached back to a long-standing dream of traveling around the world - a sojourn she sought to broaden her world view and plumb the fullness of her internal resources to create a more authentic life.

Though most of Gina's travels have been solo, she postponed her world trip because she had always envisioned sharing that special journey with a friend. After a decade with still no takers, in 2000 Gina resigned her full-time position to fulfill her dream.

For five consecutive months she traveled to 21 countries and filed a paid weekly Web column for the Hartford Courant called "Journey with Gina." Women across the United States and from the Caribbean e-mailed to cheer her on, express gratitude for her inspiration and seek logistical guidance and spiritual support for their own solo journeys, as did the women who Gina met around the world in many countries - China, New Zealand, Israel and Vietnam to name just four. These interactions, combined with the burgeoning women's travel market in the United States, planted the seed for her book, "Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road", which will be published in 2007. Well before Gina's world tour, during which she visited locales as remote as Pitcairn and Easter islands, she had traveled to more than half of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and to six of the seven continents.