Taking Readers on Your Vacation

When a friend or relative offers to tell you about their vacation, or show you photos of it, do you assent with enthusiasm and curiosity?

Pen and tire images from Pixabay

No, you do not. You agree out of politeness, while praying they give you a two-sentence summary. After all, you can’t be expected to experience their vacation.

Why, then, do we read travel books? We don’t even know these authors, yet we read with eager interest about a trip they once took. They don’t show us their cellphones, encouraging us to scroll through pictures. They offer only words, yet through those words, we feel like we’ve traveled to the place along with them. How do they do that?

I’ve read several travel books in recent years (maybe I’ll write one of my own—who knows?) and, though not all rank among the classics, each transports the reader to another place in a readable and intriguing way.

Contiguous 48 USA by Chris Dyer

Travel when you’re young, they say, and author Chris Dyer did so. Driving by car at age 25, he visited the forty-eight contiguous states while seeing friends and relatives (and bars, baseball diamonds, and basketball courts) along the way. His book includes helpful advice for those planning their own long trips.

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck

A classic of travel literature, this book follows Steinbeck and his poodle in a camper across much of the country, searching for the essence of the nation. Steinbeck focused on the people he encountered, the general state of America, and the joy of being lost. He found America in the early 1960s differed from the America of his youth, but modern readers will find it’s changed even more since his travels.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Among the quirkiest books on my list, this chronicles the author’s grim fascination with presidential assassinations. She toured many of the sites involved with these tragic events, a series of trips nobody else is likely to take. Throughout the book, her snarky humor keeps readers intrigued.

Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Half-Moon

Like Steinbeck, this author drove by camper over much of the United States, and wrote, for the most part, about the people he met and the history of the areas. He shunned the interstates in favor of narrower roads and smaller towns. A long book, it still succeeds in holding a reader’s interest.

Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson went to Europe and didn’t like it much, but at least he made some money from a book about his ordeal. He poked fun at the continent, and in a humorous way.

Better Than Fiction: True Travel Stories from Great Fiction Writers, edited by Don George

A nice collection of short essays by a variety of authors, this book will take you many places, some of them distant and exotic. The quality of the essays varies, but I enjoyed the book overall.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Many rate this a classic, but I almost dropped it from this list. It barely meets my definition of travel literature. Yes, Thoreau traveled to Walden Pond in Massachusetts and described the area well. But he concentrated on prescribing a different way to live. Not content to tell us about the wilderness, he urged us all to move there.

Lewis and Clark Expedition: A History from Beginning to End by Henry Freeman

Unlike the other books on my list, this one chronicles a trip the author never made. Written in a rather bland style, the book keeps a reader’s interest due to the nature of this famous historical journey of exploration. With our modern world mapped and accessible by plane, it’s difficult for us to imagine trekking with horses and wagons.

Roughing It by Mark Twain

More than most books on this list, Roughing It combines an arduous journey to then-unfamiliar places with sparkling wit. Nevada, California, and Hawaii are airline destinations for us, merely hours away. For Twain’s contemporary audience, those places seemed wild and remote. Still, the humor shines through even after a hundred and fifty years.

Summary

Most of us take a vacation, enjoy it, and that’s it. We fail in our attempts to share the experience with others through photos and verbal descriptions. A good author, though, can share a vacation with millions, using two techniques: (1) Paint a vivid word-picture of the locations, thus transporting the reader there, and (2) Write with a captivating style.

I’m sure you’ll want to read in detail about a vacation taken by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

A Long Weekend in Arizona, and Beyond

On occasion, I’ve included posts about my travels in this blog. However, since I’m a fiction writer, not every word of these posts is true. Last weekend, I traveled to Phoenix to attend a wedding.

Morning at Camelback Mountain

While in town, my wife and I went sightseeing. On Friday morning, we drove to Camelback Mountain, named for its resemblance to an animal that has never set foot in the Sonoran Desert. It’s a mountain for serious hikers, and I’d like to say we hiked up and down in record time, but I can’t. We snapped a few pictures and left.

Scene from Saguaro Lake

That afternoon, we took a delightful cruise on windy Saguaro Lake aboard the boat Desert Belle. Narrated by Captain Gino, the cruise took about ninety minutes and we enjoyed seeing the desert mountain scenery and hearing facts and stories about the area.

View from South Mountain

On Saturday morning, we drove to South Mountain Park. Though you can hike up the mountain, we found it much easier to drive to the summit. If you do likewise, take it easy on the roads; they’re full of hairpin turns and blind bends.

The wedding took place Saturday afternoon, with perfect weather, and I’ll simply say the bride looked beautiful and the couple is now well and truly joined in matrimony.

On Sunday, we met a college friend of mine and ate lunch at the quirky Buffalo Chip Saloon in Cave Creek. I couldn’t resist ordering the Buffalo Stew and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The author, blocking a view of the Grand Canyon

My wife and I got up early Monday morning and drove to the Grand Canyon. Although I took pictures, I’m now convinced you can’t appreciate that place through other people’s photos or videos. You must go there.

Two people had recommended we see the red cliffs in the town of Sedona, situated between the Canyon and Phoenix, so we drove back that way. Driving along State Road 89A, which winds its way down Oak Creek Canyon, we took in the majestic mountain terrain on a road the mostly followed the serpentine path carved by the creek.

Red Cliffs of Sedona. Beware of vortexes.

I’d grown tired of driving, so my wife and I switched places. She drove along the touristy main road of Sedona with its slow speed limits and frequent lights. We stopped twice to take pictures of the towering, rust-colored rock formations. You really get a sense of geological time and the slow power of water in such a place.

Then a strange thing happened.

Just past Airport Road, I felt something odd while sitting in the passenger seat. While still belted in, I experienced an upward whirling sensation, as if being twirled in a spiral manner. I saw the car spinning below me, then the town, then the entire desert.

Panicking, I tried to see what was lifting my body, only to discover I had no body. My senses had somehow separated from it, and I could see the turning sphere of our Earth below me without having to breathe or suffer any discomfort.

Of my galactic voyage through our own and many alternate universes—some where the void is light and the stars dark, others where magic outweighs science, and still others where living stars and planets converse and philosophize—I can’t say much. Mainly this is because our Earthly vocabulary is too limited, too constrained by our provincial understandings.

After a wondrous, crystalline eternity spent wandering various dimensions and astral planes, I felt myself drawn back to our tiny orb. Down I spiraled, toward North America, toward Arizona, toward Sedona, but this time not to the mesa near the local airfield, but rather toward a reddish rock formation southwest of there.

Without warning, I was back in the car, awash in a sensation of spiritual renewal and psychic vitality. “Did you feel that?” I asked my wife. She looked puzzled. “Feel what?”

Only later did I learn Airport Mesa is a so-called “masculine vortex” of outward energy, and nearby Cathedral Rock is a “feminine vortex” of inward energy.

Someone should have forewarned—

  Poseidon’s Scribe