"Road trip: those are still the two most inspiring words to vagabonds and couch potatoes alike; after all, the great American spirit was forged by road trippers from the Pilgrims to Lewis and Clark to the Dharma Bums. Le Road Trip combines the appeal of the iconic American quest with France's irresistible allure, offering readers a totally new perspective of life on the road.
Le Road Trip tells the story of one idyllic French honeymoon trip, but it is also a witty handbook of tips and advice on how to thrive as a traveler, a captivating visual record with hundreds of watercolor illustrations, and a chronicle depicting the incomparable charms of being footloose in France. Armchair travelers, die-hard vagabonds, art journalists, and red wine drinkers will all find something to savor in this story." ~ Bloomsbury
***
"Veteran globetrotter Swift set out to chronicle her French honeymoon but ended up penning a quirky love letter to travel filled with cultural, historical and literary references. Delightful watercolors illustrate this wide-ranging field guide, which offers hilarious travel survival tips for every clime as well as ruminations on subjects as varied as Parisian windows, Breton sailor-stripe shirts, and lettuce (not to mention a highly idiosyncratic A-to-Z on vagabonding in the Bordeaux region)." ~ France Magazine
Oh, and here's a cute picture for you, too.
For some reason this just says "classy French vagabond" to me. If you were to write your own "quirky love letter to travel," what would it say?
On Travel:
ReplyDelete“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
Augustine
“There is no truth but in transit.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
John Steinbeck
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler in unaware.”
Martin Buber
“Traveling is almost like conversing with men of other centuries.”
Descartes
“Travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts.”
Paul Theroux
“A trip is an entity. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness.”
John Steinbeck
“Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion. But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space.”
Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express
“The only true travelers are those who leave for leaving’s sake.”
Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go, I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, El Dorado
“I love to travel, but hate to arrive.”
Albert Einstein
“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
• Lao-Tzu
“It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”
Ursula K. LeGuin
“A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.”
William Least Heat- Moon, Blue Highways
“We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.”
Jack Kerouac
“O public road, you express me better than I can express myself.”
Walt Whitman
“The body, lady, is like a house: it don’t go anywhere: but the spirit, lady, is like an automobile: always on the move, always.”
Mr. Shiflet in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be
“I may be goin’ to hell in a bucket, babe,
But at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride.”
Grateful Dead
“I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived.”
Anna Louise Strong
“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”
Lawrence Block
“People don’t take trips . . . trips take people.”
John Steinbeck
"Sometimes on flights you luck up and meet interesting folks who not only share similar academic interests, but who also take the time to comment on your blog posts."
ReplyDelete-Liza Turner
Hope all is well - and that you've had many traveling adventures over the past three years - Tom!