I’ve about had it with RV and road trip how-to books. Of course I brought this upon myself. I chose to read them. Understand, I appreciate knowing how the 12-volt electrical system works, how to level the trailer at a campsite, and how to properly empty the dump tanks. (That last one is crucial.) But this stuff doesn’t exactly inspire. And it can only take you so far. You can’t learn to back up or hitch a trailer by reading a book.

So I’m tapering off the how-to stuff and moving on to guide books on parks, food, and nature, and travel literature. The guide books are fun to skim and they get me excited about heading out. The travel literature provides perspective and promotes a kind of thoughtfulness about the experience and what to make of it. Danine reads a lot of Bill Bryson. His books are funny and full of shrewd insights. Like Mark Twain, he’s a keen observer of human behavior (folly) and good at teaching you to not take your adventures, or yourself, too seriously. I was an English major, which means I tend to read books many people hate. For example, one of my favorite travel books is Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In it Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the many strange cities he has visited. The book is not travel writing in any conventional sense. It’s about the imagination and the nature of all cities. I like it.

I just started reading Journey without Maps by Graham Greene. I’m a big fan of Greene’s novels (especially The Power and the Glory), so I thought I’d check out his travel writing. Like a fool, I read the introduction. Never read the introductions to books. Not once have they ever enhanced or clarified the book for me. In this case, it’s by Paul Theroux, who I believed was a Greene disciple, as well as a great travel writer himself. But he considers Greene’s idea for the trip (hiking through the bush of 1930’s Liberia for four weeks) to be half-baked and focuses on Greene’s more prejudiced observations. In other words, the intro deflates the book and damns it with faint praise. I can’t say for sure if he actually liked it! Anyway, my mistake. It’ll be good.

You may be asking, “What does some Brit’s four-week scramble through the Liberian jungle over 70 years ago have to do with your rather comfortable tour of the US in an Airstream trailer?” That’s a great question. I haven’t a clue. Yet.