10 Facts About Aloha Wanderwell by Laurel Corona 

I first stumbled across Aloha Wanderwell in a thin book about interesting women in  Vancouver Island history. Leafing through, I stopped on the name “Aloha Wanderwell,”  because with a singular name like that, who wouldn’t? I was intrigued by the story of a fearless teenager who set out to conquer the world by car long before roads existed and before people in most places had ever seen the bellowing contraption known as an automobile.  

Intrigue gave way to enchantment as I dug deeper into Aloha’s life and saw not just the amazing achievement of driving across India, China, Africa and South America—almost half a million miles before she hopped out of the expedition Model Ts for the final time— but the touching story of a young woman working through typical teenage angst as she  

matured into a formidable woman. Her story has everything—love, death, betrayal,  ecstasy, abject misery, hope, despair, and more than a few instances of mortal fear. I  knew I just had to write a book about her, and Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel  (Sibylline, 2026) is the result.  

Here are ten facts about Aloha: 

1. She was born Idris Hall in 1906 and grew up on Vancouver Island, British  Columbia. She was left in a boarding school there at age 10, while her mother took her younger sister to England to care for her husband, who was injured in  World War I. This was the first of several betrayals and abandonments that would later shape her character. 
2. She developed a defiant personality in her boarding school years, rolling her own cigarettes, sneaking out to the movie houses, and learning how to drive a visiting uncle’s car. Later she was expelled from one school for punching the Mother  Superior in the face while struggling to get back the racy, clandestine diary the nuns had taken from her room. 
3. At 16, in 1922, she snuck out of her finishing school in Nice to attend a talk by  Walter “Cap” Wanderwell about his “around the world by car” expedition, and was so struck by the amazing pictures he showed of the places he had been that she went up to him afterwards and asked to join the expedition.  
4. Idris changed her name to Aloha Wanderwell, and the next day she began what would become nearly half a million miles of travel across five continents at a time when few people ventured further than a hundred miles from where they were born. 
5. Aloha always drove her own car, making her not only the first woman to drive around the world but the first to drive in Egypt, India, Africa, Russia, Manchuria,  Japan, the US and South and Central America. 
6. The driving was often excruciating and life threatening, with no chance of rescue, and there were no roads for much of it, only tracks suitable for carts or walking, rivers to ford, and treacherous mountain passes to navigate. 
7. Aloha and Cap became world famous for the films they made, but after 10 years on the road, their ideas differed on what should come next, with Aloha favoring flying to more exotic destinations than could be reached by car, and Cap wanting to travel the world by boat. Though they maintained a united public face, their marriage at this point was falling apart. 
8. Aloha married Cap at 18, but the relationship was turbulent due to Cap’s  womanizing and his difficulties in seeing her as a partner rather than an assistant, as well as Aloha’s anxieties about her future and Cap’s level of commitment and love. 
9. In December 1932 , an assailant came aboard the schooner Cap had bought and murdered him. The death created international headlines and the press treated  Aloha as a freakish deviant and primary suspect. The likely murderer was tried and acquitted and officially, the murder remains unsolved today. 
10. Aloha married again after Cap’s death and though she tried to continue her traveling life, audiences had moved beyond silent movies and no longer saw  Aloha as the daring and fresh-faced ingenue she once had been. She settled into a conventional life as a suburban matron, dying in 1996 in Newport Beach, California, shortly before her 90th birthday. 

Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel

In the 1920s and 1930s, Aloha Wanderwell drove Model Ts across five continents, winning fame as the most traveled woman in the world.

Sixteen-year-old Idris Hall ran away from her boarding achool in 1924, changed her name, and joined the daring around-the-world expedition of charismatic Walter “Cap” Wanderwell, beginning a decade-long adventure that would take her across five continents behind the wheel of a Model T, in an era where roads were often no more than grooves in the dirt, and few if any people had seen a car or a European face.

Who was Aloha Wanderwell? How did she find the determination and courage to survive threats like stampeding elephants in Africa, a blizzard obliterating the road in Ukraine, and armed militants in China? Who was Walter Wanderwell? Rogue, philanderer, con man, and perhaps a German spy—he was all of this, as well as the love of Aloha’s life. Through the grit of their travel and the giddy heights of their international fame, Aloha grows from a starstruck teen to a woman confident of everything except the man who cannot love her the way she needs.

Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel is a richly imagined exploration of Aloha’s inner and outer world, told against the backdrop of one of the great adventure stories of its time, and the murder that brought it to a catastrophic end.

BUY HERE

—

About the Author

Laurel Corona is the author of The Four Seasons and The Mapmaker’s Daughter, among other works of fiction and non-fiction. After retiring as a professor of Humanities at San Diego City College, she now travels the world as a lecturer for several luxury cruise lines. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including a Christopher Medal and the Theodor Geisel Award for Book of the Year at the San Diego Book Awards. A native of Southern California, she now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Praise for Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel

“…this is historical fiction at its most entertaining. In Laurel Corona’s
capable hands, Aloha Wanderwell becomes unforgettable.”
—Susan Meissner, USA Today bestselling author of A Map to Paradise

“Fans of historical fiction about kick-ass women as well as those who
love a good, juicy crime story will enjoy this book!”
—Sherry Jones, author, Josephine Baker’s Last Dance

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing