Driving Over Lemons

Driving Over Lemons is a quintessential travel book that inspired me to throw away my regular life and start exploring the world.

This classic tale takes you to far-flung shores bathed in sunshine, filled with misadventures, and bursting with glorious food. What more could you need to start dreaming, take a leap, and make your perfect life a reality? 

This is my go-to for the start of any big project and always gives me the courage to go for it and laugh in the face of adversity on the way.

Chris Stewart had a circuitous path to ex-pat life in Spain. He was the drummer for the band Genisis, a sheep shearer, and a travel writer. Then he and his wife bought a farm in Andalusia and grew olives, almonds, and lemons. His book Driving Over Lemons was an unexpected hit, with 350,000 copies sold.

Suddenly, people were making a pilgrimage to their farm in Spain. Although Stewart follows some of the familiar tropes of the genre (the resourceful locals, the quirky members of the ex-pat community), his writing is fresh and funny. Unlike Peter Kerr, Stewart and his wife… show more.

I've never met an expat that hasn't read this book. Chris Stewart has a unique style of explaining situations and places that bring alive the imagination. The humour he uses keeps the book entertaining, and to be honest, it was after reading this book that encouraged me to convert my emails back home into a book of a similar style. Thanks Chris.

Driving Over Lemons took me on a humorous journey to a dilapidated farm in the Alpujarra Mountains in Southern Spain. I could picture many of the scenes in my mind and I laughed out loud at the unusual experiences Chris and his wife experienced as they settled into their new rural life running a rustic sheep farm in unfamiliar territory.

I bought this book when the idea of moving to Spain was just that, simply an idea. By the last page of Lemons, my mind was buzzing. We could do this, I thought. And we could, and we did. So that’s why I recommend Chris’s book. He inspired our own move to Spain and without his book we may never have driven over lemons, (or figs, or olives, or almonds), or rescued a vulture, or lived in a tiny, crazy, mountain village, or written a series about our own adventures. Thank you, Chris Stewart!