The first woman to drive around the world was a teenager in a Model T. Aloha Wanderwell (you guessed it--not her birth name, but that's a story for another time) had just turned sixteen when she abandoned her finishing school in 1922 to go off with a charismatic adventurer, Walter Wanderwell (not his birth name either) in his quest to drive around the world. She celebrated her eighteenth birthday in Vladivostok, after driving across Europe, Egypt, India, Malaysia, China and Manchuria years before there were roads in many places suitable for more than the local carts that carried goods to markets.
But Aloha and Walter, whom everyone called Cap, were not done. In the years that followed, she drove her own car nearly the entire length of Africa, from Cape Town to Mombasa, stopped in their quest to make it all the way to Cairo by a deadly civil war in Sudan. They then planned their most ambitious trip, to follow the route of the still incomplete Pan American Highway from Buenos Aires across the Andes, continuing north through South and Central America to the United States. They made it across the Andes in car with engines no larger than those on a ride-on lawnmower today, and eventually the two of them arrived in Texas.
It would be their last adventure together. In December 1932, while aboard the schooner they had bought to sail around the world, Cap was murdered. It remains one of the great unsolved crimes in Los Angeles history.
That's the shorthand biographical version of Aloha and Cap's story, but there's so much more. In my new novel, Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel (Sibylline Press, May 2026), I explore the inner life of what seems in many ways the impossible story of a girl brave enough to head out into the unknown, and headstrong enough to stick with a man whose complexities revealed themself over their years of travel. I imagine how her experiences changed her, speculating about the depths and heights of their relationship and how it evolved from girlish infatuation, to love, to disillusionment, to sorrow and loss.
There's so much in this story. I hope you will pick up a copy and join Aloha on her journey. You can learn more about this and my other books at www.laurelcorona.com, and follow a special blog here for more information about Aloha and this book.
