American Adventures Month

This will be my last column for now, intrepid readers, as my most recent stint at CDPL is coming to a close. So, to note the dawning of a new escapade, my final column is going to celebrate that August is American Adventures Month!

Friends, we live in a stunning hemisphere. From Cape Horn to Kaffeklubben Island, the Americas are a riot of cultural, linguistic, climatic, and topographical diversity spanning nearly 10,000 miles. Whether your speed is a frugal nomad, luxurious adventurer, or armchair archeologist, the library is here to help you sally forth to the beckoning horizon.

In what is explicitly our travel section (917-918), your library has more than 200 books about traveling to destinations in the Americas including a massive portion about various states, state and national parks, and American travelogs that guide you to places you’ll be able to explore without ever applying for (or renewing) that passport.

In the gorgeous and informative “Complete National Parks of the United States” (917.3 Whi), Mel White, under the banner of National Geographic, has assembled a beautiful and informative book detailing more than 400 national parks, monuments, battlefields, and landmarks for your delectation. Now a book like that is going to be a birdseye view, but the library has you covered if you’d like more detailed information.

For example, if you do want to dust off that passport, seek out a book like Lonely Planet’s guide to “Banff, Jasper, and Glacier National Parks” (917.12 Sai) which gives you enough information to completely plan where you’ll stay, what you’ll eat and see and do and when that can all happen.

If you were to visit any of those parks you would already (excepting the southern part of Glacier) be sojourning with our famously friendly neighbors to the north, so consider also peeking at Eyewitness Travel’s “Guide to Canada” (917.1 Eye) to expand your great northern adventure.

We have travel guides for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, but I promised not to neglect the frugal rovers! Rough Guides’ “South America on a Budget” (918.044 Rou) explores, in nearly 1,000 pages, numerous countries and how to enjoy them in budget-friendly ways giving preference to inexpensive accommodations, activities, and eats and teaching the reader about local and regional public transportation systems.

The aforementioned titles are useful for trip planning, but there is a slew of books that detail others’ meanderings that are perfect for mental travelers who are happy to explore a new world from the comfort of their favorite reading chair. These books also allow for something magical: time travel.

Consider Tony Cohan’s “Mexican Days” (917.2), a transporting tale of a wider exploration of Mexico after his small town about which he wrote in “On Mexican Time” (972 Coh) gets invaded by tourists and a Hollywood movie crew. Another offering is “Along the Inca Road” (918.044 Mul) by Karin Muller where she journeys in both space and time to explore the Incan Empire.

When I lived in Oklahoma City, I participated in something called Couchsurfing. It’s a website where people with a couch (or sometimes, mirabile dictu, a spare bedroom) offer that to travelers free of charge and your “payment” is an exchange of stories and the ability to stay with someone when you travel. In fact, when I went to Dallas for my Peace Corps interview about four months before I would ship out for Malawi, I Couchsurfed with a Ph.D. student of history at Southern Methodist University. Her couch was very uncomfortable, but she took me to a Dallas Couchsurfer pitch-in (theme: Sri Lankan food) which has been some of the finest food (at the best price point: free) I’ve had to date!

This seeming aside is all to tell you about “The Illustrated Route 66 Historical Atlas” (917.8 Hin) wherein Jim Hinckley takes the reader along the iconic western route as it appears now and in the past. As a non-lover of cars, such a trip never occurred to me, but I tell you all this because the number of Europeans traveling Route 66 – as if characters in Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” – who Couchsurfed with me was extraordinary. Adventure, perhaps, is in the eye of the beholder. Never underestimate what can be found in your proverbial backyard.

My last suggestions are books and their movie counterparts – stories that are about exploring a physical place but also ourselves. Leave behind the trappings of suburban wealth with its vacuous patterns of consumption and acquisition and travel with Chris McCandless in the book “Into the Wild” brilliantly told by Jon Krakauer (917.98 and DVD Fic Int). Travel from Brazil to Peru through the eyes of those left behind in “The Motorcycle Diaries” (DVD FL-SPA Mot) where a young Ernesto “Che” Guevara leaves Brazil as a medical student with his sights set on success and arrives in a Peruvian leper colony a champion of the exploited. 

Friends, by all means, explore, but there are dark sides to travel: subtle exploitative relationships between those with money traveling and those who cater to them, the carbon, and small places being overrun with tourists often disrupting or destroying the pristine beauty or way of life being sought. Don’t travel to consume an experience: travel to change and grow. Let the library facilitate thoughtful planning or take you along for the ride. Be well, dear reader, and happy trails!