{"id":219,"date":"2013-06-24T08:00:23","date_gmt":"2013-06-24T08:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/?p=219"},"modified":"2013-06-24T02:14:23","modified_gmt":"2013-06-24T02:14:23","slug":"the-armchair-traveler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/the-armchair-traveler\/","title":{"rendered":"The Armchair Traveler"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.staticflickr.com\/2823\/9122845650_d4fb9c19d6_m.jpg\" alt=\"AWOL on the Appalachian Trail book\" \/>Some of my favorite books are travel books. Last month I borrowed a guide to Iceland, and looked especially at the remote northern region known as the Westfjords. Now, I&#8217;ve never been to Iceland, have no immediate plans to do so, and frankly my partner in all things indicates that I am a lunatic for even thinking about it. But now I now where to find the best place to eat locally caught fish &#8211; and, oh look! A pizza joint!<\/p>\n<p>Travel books generally consist of guide books &#8211; where to go, where to stay, what and where to eat &#8211; and what are sometimes called &#8216;travel memoirs&#8217;, which at minimum consist of &#8220;Where I went, stayed and ate&#8221;. The best of these are far more interesting than that, of course.<\/p>\n<p>The <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/travel\/artsandculture\/travelbooks\/4932008\/The-20-best-travel-books-of-all-time.html#\">Daily Telegraph<\/a><\/span><\/em> of London did a list of twenty best travel books, from Kerouac&#8217;s <em>On the Road <\/em>through George Orwell&#8217;s <em>Homage to Catalonia <\/em>to Bruce Chatwin&#8217;s <em>In Patagonia. <\/em>Pick any of these and you won&#8217;t go wrong. My own choice of these &#8211;\u00a0 the strangely Victorian explorer-out-of-his-time Wilfred Thesiger&#8217;s <em>Arabian Sands<\/em> details five years wandering among the Bedouin of the desert known as The Empty Quarter.<\/p>\n<p>Lastly I&#8217;ll mention my favorite travel book, the hard to find\u00a0 <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Happy-Traveller-Book-Poor\/dp\/B005FRKDJQ\">The Happy Traveller<\/a><\/span><\/em> (1923) by the Reverend Frank Tatchell, an eccentric English clergyman who &#8211; paying for a curate to cover his duties &#8211; spent much time travelling alone, often in disguise as a tramp. If you want advice as to what to do if attacked by wild dogs or middle eastern mobs, this is the place to start!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of my favorite books are travel books. Last month I borrowed a guide to Iceland, and looked especially at the remote northern region known as the Westfjords. Now, I&#8217;ve never been to Iceland, have no immediate plans to do so, and frankly my partner in all things indicates that I am a lunatic for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/the-armchair-traveler\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Armchair Traveler&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiobooksnow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}