Unearthed

What do you get when a history nerd, a craft beer obsessive, and a malfunctioning CPAP machine fly into Europe?
Apparently, a near-arrest at the Louvre, a near-death experience in Amsterdam, and the best night of your life watching the sun set through Stonehenge.
Scott Edwin Williams has spent years writing about history from the comfort of his study. He knows where Caesar was cremated, who built the Pantheon, and exactly why Pompeii never stood a chance. What he doesn't know—until now—is what any of it actually feels like.
So he books a ticket. And then his best friend CJ invites himself along.
What follows is five weeks of historical pilgrimage, accidental misadventure, and the kind of travel that no guidebook prepares you for: a budget coach tour populated almost entirely by septuagenarians and one woman who makes Cruella de Vil look easygoing; a houseboat with a strict no-shitting policy; a Venetian grappa bar that may or may not have saved the friendship; and a Pompeii guide who looks like he survived a bender and dressed accordingly—and turns out to be the most compelling person on the trip.
Scott gets his history. He stands where Caesar fell. He touches a sarsen stone at Stonehenge as the sun sets between the trilithons. He weeps—quietly, and with some dignity—in front of the Pieta. He gets entirely too close to the Mona Lisa.
He also walks an inhuman number of kilometers, drinks a heroic quantity of beer, loses his backpack in Venice, nearly gets flattened by a bus, and discovers that the best stories are almost never the ones you planned.
Unearthed is part travelogue, part comedy, part love letter to the places where the past refuses to stay buried. It's about what happens when you finally stop reading about history and go looking for it—and find, somewhere between the plague pits of Smithfield and the sun-drenched terraces of Positano, that it was never quite what you imagined. Richer, stranger, more human, and considerably more chaotic.
It's also about what you unearth when you're not looking: the friendships that survive forty years and three weeks of 24/7 proximity; the family connections that outlast decades of distance; and the quiet, bus-dodging epiphany that it might finally be time to start living in the present tense.
For anyone who has ever stood in front of something ancient and felt the centuries compress. For anyone who has ever ordered the wrong beer in the wrong country and considered it a triumph. For anyone who knows that the best travel companion is the one who will mock you just enough to stop you taking yourself too seriously.
Unearthed is for you.