Good Travel Books Are Novels At Heart.

The North-south Line Of 'the Mountains,' Meaning The Cascade Range, Forty Miles East Of Seattle, Is A Rigid Political Frontier.

The [travel] Writer, Looking Back At The Journey From A Distance Of A Year Or Two (or Three), Is A Different Character From The Hapless Character Who Undertook The Trip: Wise After The Event, With The Leisure To Tease Out Meanings From The Experience That The Distracted Traveler Never Had, And Often Impatient With His Alter Ego's Blinkered And Unsatisfactory Version Of Things.

The Only Real River I Knew Was Hardly More Than A Brook. It Spilled Through A Tumbledown Mill At The Bottom Of Our Road, Opened Into A Little Trouty Pool, Then Ran On Through Water Meadows Over Graveled Shallows Into Fakenham [england], Where It Slowed And Deepened, Gathering Strength For The Long Drifts Across Muddy Flatlands To Norwich And The North Sea.

I've Taught The Better Class Of Tourist Both To See And Not To See; To Lift Their Eyes Above And Beyond The Inessentials, And Thrill To Our Western Nature In Her Majesty.

Travel. It Was An Intransitive Verb. It Didn't Involve Any Destinations. It Was Going To The Going's Sake, To Be Anywhere But Where You Were, With Motion Itself As The Only Object.