Travel Literature

A year ago I would walk into mega bookstores like Barnes and Noble and head straight to the magazines of photography section. Today when I walk in I head straight for the travel section. Though every time I seem to be quite disappointed. There are several shelves filled of books that list every restaurant, park, club, and museum in the country. You can buy these books by city, state, country and more. You can read all the ratings of the food and how much they cost to see what fits your budget. But for all the people who buy these books and the millions of travelers around the globe there is only a small portion of the travel section designated for essays and the stories that really make traveling what it is. Of the millions of travel books sold telling about reviews, there should be another thousand to accompany them with the stories.

In this year I have become more opinionated on what traveling, roadtripping, and tourism are. To me, it doesn’t much matter if you’re on a motorcycle, camping in tents, sleeping in a motorhome, eating at 4-star restaurants, or seeing the finest museums. I can send a hundred people to a great restaurant in Times Square and be pretty sure that at least 97 of them will enjoy it.

Traveling to me is about experience, adventure, and people. The interactions among people are what make a traveling experience unique. Choose to walk around the Louvre all day or spend time with a local artist in his studio? That to me is the different between tourism and travel. Most books in the travel section are tourism books. I hope to inspire more travel writing, to bring out stories of excitement, relationships, interactions, and human characteristics. I hope to find travel magazines that are full of stories from people like you and me, not another review of Hilton Head Resort.

There are the restaurant and resort reviews that fill the books, then there are the people and stories that fill the restaurant. Those stories are what make a book and maybe I can write my own. If nothing else that’s just one more idea, a magazine based on reader submissions and their traveling stories.

The bottom line is you could be at a dump of a restaurant with awesome people and have the best night of your life, and you could be at a 5-star restaurant with miserable people and have a terrible night.