He Said She Said

Sixteen years after the conclusion of the worlds most epic road trip, Paige Parker is finally sharing her side of the story

- Charmian Leong

It’s hard to separate Paige Parker from the image of her husband, Jim Rogers, the American business heavyweight who rode around the world on a motorcycle in 1990 and wrote about it in Investment Biker. And did it again almost a decade later – this time in a car with Parker – with the adventure documented in Adventure Capitalist. Both trips were in the Guinness World Records.

But this isn’t Rogers’ story. It’s Parker’s, as she emphatically states in the prologue of her book, Don’t Call Me Mrs Rogers: Love, Loathing & Our Epic Drive Around the World, out this month. She is every bit his partner in life and on the road as she is a proud mother of two daughters, a board member of UN Women, a gemologist, a supporter of local arts and, now, a published writer. “When I read Jim’s book, I thought it wasn’t my story, and I wanted mine out there for my daughter, Happy, whom I was pregnant with at the time (2003),” she says. She completed it in 2006, four years after the end of the record breaking trip through 116 countries, but publishing her account of it took a back seat to other priorities, such as moving to Singapore, raising her children Hilton Augusta (who goes by Happy) and Beeland (also known as Bee), and training to become a gemologist.