How to Travel Without Leaving Your Couch

Are your vacation plans stuck in the driveway this weekend?

As Hurricane Irene whips its way up the East Coast, families are evacuating or preparing to bunk down for the weekend.  Vacations to the beach are cancelled as people retreat further inland.

If you're dreading a long weekend spent indoors, looking for something to do, why not check out your book shelf?  (Or Amazon or whatever store you get your ebooks off of).  I know the books I bought years ago that are now gathering dust are certainly looking appealing to me.  Which is why I finally started Mirror, Mirror.

Stop, wait, I know.  This isn't my Arts & Entertainment blog for book and movie reviews.  It's a travel blog.  So why am I writing about books?

For years, I had never traveled further than North Carolina (and I barely remembered that family vacation).  Instead of me travelling to far away lands, my form of escape came to me within the pages of a good fantasy travel story.  Fantasy epics that sweep across vast worlds -- I can't wait to get my hands on them!  I think every great fantasy story has a little bit of a travel story built in.  After all, in order to write a good fantasy story, you need to develop and define a fictional universe and in order to do that, you need to explore it.

My gateway to other worlds

The top shelf of my bookcase is reserved for my favorites, and on it you can find the entire Harry Potter series, His Dark Materials, The Old Kingdom Trilogy by Garth Nix, Kushiel's Avatar and The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice.  And I would contend that all of these have large travel elements to them.  Harry Potter?  Travel? Yes! Harry explores what to him is a whole new world and culture after learning of his wizard heritage.  That means an exciting trip to Diagon Alley (and a run in at "the bad part of town", Knockturn Alley), a train ride to Scotland, exhiliriating (ha) hiking outings through the Forbidden Forest and of course, let's not forget that they spent the majority of Deathly Hallows camping.  If you're familiar with any of the other series, then the travel elements in those are much more obvious.

So what am I currently reading?  Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire.  Other highlights of his include Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.  Wicked is full of travel and the map at the front of the novel becomes a necessity.  So I am very much excited to have begun reading Mirror Mirror, which is a retelling of Snow White.  Though only 30 pages into the novel, I have already read beautiful descriptions of the Italian countryside where the story takes place.

The world was called Montefiore, as far as she knew, and from her aerie on every side all the world descended. [...] She was more familiar with the vistas, the promising valleys with their hidden hamlets, the scope of the future arranged in terms of hills and light. [...] Too far from anywhere important to serve as a casale - a country house - it crowned an upthrust shoulder of land.  (Maguire 5-6)

Such a beautiful description of the land.  Succinct vocabulary choices, unique ways of phrasing it.  I love it.  This is how I like my travel writing - it should be inspiring.  It should make me long to go there and see it myself.  Forget "ways to save money by booking this crappy hotel".  I want travel to be romantic.  It's how it should be, I feel.  A chance to appreciate the beauty of the world and the people living on it.

So that's why this weekend I'm vacationing on my couch, curled up with a good book and dreaming of magical, far off places.  It sure beats FarmVille!

Work Cited

Maguire, Gregory. Mirror Mirror.  New York: HarperCollins, 2003.