Exploring Death Valley with J.F. Penn

Two thousand miles, one campervan, and a trail of unanswered questions. For the final episode of the season, join Mrs R and I me as we retrace our recent camper van adventure — from Dover to the foot of Mont Blanc and back — and the stories we picked up along the way. We start in Normandy, at an abbey built on a tidal island that no army ever managed to take. Then south, to the mountain where two hundred people walked into the flames rather than say the words that would have saved them. We follow the Templars to the point where the trail simply stops, and nobody has ever picked it up again. We visit the village where an alchemist may or may not have hidden something in a chateau, and where a hotelier's tall tale grew, quietly and accidentally, into an entire genre of fiction. What struck me by the end wasn't any one of those stories. It was how close together they sit. You can drive between them in an afternoon, and often we did — parked up somewhere with the kettle on, ten minutes from a place where something genuinely strange happened eight hundred years ago. That's the thing about doing it in a van. History stops being something you visit and starts being something you're camped in the middle of. This also marks the final episode of season two. Thank you for coming along for the ride! We'll be back in a few months so make sure you're subscribed and signed up to the Adventure Society. The episode features lots of the settings in my upcoming book, the Alchemist's Codex. Check that out here. The Alchemist's Codex will be the eighth book in Eden's adventures, and this time she's heading to France. What if Notre-Dame's fire wasn't an accident? What if it was a ploy — a way to find something that's lain hidden beneath the cathedral for hundreds of years? That's where Eden's trail begins, in the shadow of Notre-Dame, chasing a secret someone was willing to burn a cathedral to reach. From there it winds through Renaissance châteaux and down into the Pyrénées. Eden and her crew pursue the ghost of Fulcanelli — the master alchemist who vanished without a trace and left behind only whispers of a lost codex. But they're not the only ones hunting for it. The man on the other side of the trail has reasons of his own — reasons that run a great deal deeper than gold. Some say Fulcanelli cracked the oldest secret of all, but Eden's about to find out whether the legend is worth dying for.

Picture this: you're flying your trusty Cessna above the crystal-clear waters of the Caribbean when the engine note changes in a way you know it shouldn't. That's the world Nate Van Coops writes from and lives in. Nate has spent 30 years in aviation as a commercial pilot, mechanic examiner, and certified flight instructor. He's poured all of it into the Archangel Aviation series, following former Black Hawk pilot Luke Angel through sun-soaked mysteries across coastal Florida, the Gulf, and the Bahamas. In this episode, Luke sits down with Nate to find out how real flying experience becomes gripping fiction and why aviation and adventure have always gone hand in hand. In This Episode, We Explore: From art school dropout to aviation author — Nate started flying lessons at 15, detoured toward fine art, then found his way back to the sky and eventually realized the smartest move was writing about the world he already knew. Putting the aircraft front and center — Rather than treating planes as a way to get characters from A to B, Nate makes flying itself the adventure — right down to the golden-age Grumman Mallard flying boat he casts as his hero's aircraft. Real airports, real risk — From setting scenes at St. Pete's actual Albert Whitted Airport to calculating exactly how far a plane could fly on its fuel tanks, Nate explains why he'd rather mess up almost anything else in a story before the aviation. The detective who happens to be a pilot — Luke Angel solves mysteries using aviation knowledge nobody else in the story has, but Nate deliberately made sure being a pilot isn't what makes him special, since everyone in his world is one too.

We all know the story: the first woman ever made lifted the lid on something she'd been told to leave alone, releasing sickness and sorrow and death into the world, and we've been paying for it ever since. It's the tidiest morality tale in the whole Greek canon, but almost every part of it is wrong. In today's episode I sit down with James Richardson (no relation!) to talk about the real story behind Pandora and her jar — that's right, it wasn't even a box — and why he found this myth so inspiring that it shaped his latest golden age archaeological thriller, The Olympus Vendetta. James has spent years retelling Greek mythology to his own sons, and he traces these stories back through Hesiod, the Bronze Age collapse and three thousand years of retellings. We cover what Pandora's myth actually says, where the Land of the Hesperides might really be, and why Heracles keeps solving his labours with his brain instead of his fists.

There's a volcano on the western tip of Iceland where, according to one of the greatest adventure stories ever written, the journey to the centre of the earth begins. Jules Verne knew what he was doing. Because Iceland isn't just a travel destination — it's a feeling, a pull, something that gets under your skin and doesn't let go, even when you're back home, even when months have passed, even when you've already been four times. For Monika Pronczuk, though, Iceland isn't just a destination she covers on her travel blog, Plan Pack Explore. It's the one place she can't stop going back to. She first planned a family trip there in 2022 — badly, by her own admission, against a backdrop of cancelled flights, sick kids, and a volcano that erupted days before she landed. Four trips later, she still hasn't run out of places to show her family, or herself. In this episode, we go from the touristy Golden Circle to the honor-system campsites of the highlands, from troll legends written into the landscape to the one moment that actually rattled her. If a place needs to earn its "adventure" credentials, Iceland does it in the first five minutes off the plane.

Imagine an order of warrior monks so devout they prayed like priests, so wealthy that kings owed them money, and so mysterious that eight centuries on, we're still arguing about what they found beneath Jerusalem. That's the Knights Templar, and in this episode, Templar historian Tony McMahon takes us from their founding as pilgrim bodyguards to their afterlife in Freemasonry, Nazi occultism, and Assassin's Creed. Tony has written three books on the order and hosts the Talking Templars podcast. Nine knights from Champagne built a monastic army out of Europe's landless second sons; popes showered them with privileges; and when the French crown turned on them in 1307, the charges became a template for the witch trials that followed. If you're drawn to stories where history and legend never quite settled, this one's for you!