10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes

Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Award for Best Autobiography & Memoir

Part travelogue, part memoir, a book about how we say good-bye to our loved ones

It was Devin Galaudet’s job to take the ashes and pour them into the waters of Cadiz, Spain after his father’s death. Carrying them across Spain by car, train, and backpack, this was their swan song, their “buddy picture” come to life. Half a mile from the Mediterranean, though, Devin lost his father’s ashes. Standing in the middle of a windy cobblestone street in Old Town Cadiz, he wondered what the hell just happened—not just in that moment, but the forty years prior.

This is a wild-eyed history of secret family stories that includes fifty stolen cars, sacred African fertility dolls, a Darth Vader mask–wearing junkie, a mysterious secret family, a Playboy magazine found in a sewer hidden next to toilet paper wrapped downers, a Vegas hooker with one impressive breast, a hero’s journey, and traveling across the world with a black jug that contained his father in a rolling suitcase.

A wickedly funny memoir that is part adventure and part tender reminiscence, 10,000 Miles with My Dead Father’s Ashes will make you laugh, cry, and yearn for your own Spanish adventure.