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I have a friend who recently returned from a cruise around the Scandinavian countries with her mother and. . .Garrison Keillor, the author, poet and radio storyteller.
Another couple journeyed to China and Bhutan last spring, and showed several of us a DVD “album” of their fascinating photos on our big-screen TV—armchair travel at its best!
St. Louis and Kansas City are about as far away as my husband and I ever travel, but I don’t feel deprived. I am a dedicated fan of that genre of books labeled armchair travel. A trip to any of the eight branches of the Springfield-Greene County Library District sets me on a course for anywhere I want to go—in my mind.
Thousands of travel books fill numerous library shelves. But those are guides for those folks who actually are planning a trip.
What I’m talking about are books such as “The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family” by Mike Leonard. The author, a Today Show correspondent, traveled with his 80-ish-year-old parents across America in rented RVs along with three of his four adult children, wife and daughter-in-law. This close-knit clan of Irish-Americans traveled from the desert Southwest to the New England coastline—and lived to tell about it.
And then there’s this title—now, bear with me. It’s called “Cross Country: Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America With Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-law, Two Kids and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant.” If there was a best title award, this book by Robert Sullivan would win it.
Travel sometimes is an end in itself, as in “The River Queen,” by Mary Morris. The middle-aged author and empty-nester finds herself at loose ends after her father dies. She deals with her loss by leaving her home in Brooklyn, buying a battered houseboat, hiring two river pilots named Tom and Jerry and floating down the Mississippi River through the Midwest of her father’s childhood. Did anybody say Mark Twain?
The easiest way to locate armchair travel books is to go to coolcat.org from either a library or home computer. Link onto NextReads and find the armchair travel books listed there. Or, even easier, ask a librarian.
ARMCHAIR TRAVEL BOOKS AVAILABLE AT THE LIBRARY
Jeanne C. Duffey, community relations director for the Springfield-Greene County Library District, can be reached at jeanned@thelibrary.org.
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