The Road to Sleeping Dragon won a silver medal for Best Travel Book in the 2017-18 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award competition. This is my third Lowell Thomas, awarded by the Society of American Travel Writers, judged by faculty of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, and handed out at a ceremony in Barbados. (I did not go to Barbados.) “Sent to a tiny village in China by the Peace Corps in the 1990s,” the judges said, “the writer learns much more than the language. He learns, and we learn, that humanity crosses all borders. The final book in a trilogy, The Road to Sleeping Dragon,  contains more observation and reflection as he considers the mantra offered him while living in China: Go slowly, eat slowly, look slowly.”