Travel Books

by Sarah
(Muscatine)

Our public library here in Muscatine has a suprisingly large selection of travel books. You can find one for just about every country. For some countries they have many books, like 5 or 6.

Knowing this, I went to the library in search for a book a about Portugal. (I wanted to read about Portugal because in the book I was reading at the time, "Miles From NoWhere", which was about these people who biked around the world, they talked about Portugal and how beautiful it was and how nice all the people were.) There were two books om Portugal there. I skimmed through one, looked at the other, and they went back and dug more deeply in to the first.

As I was looking through it, I thought to myself how these books where sided toward the tourist. They told all about the famous places, places where if you go to the country you would probably see signs for them everywhere and wouldn't need to read all that much about them at home. I don't want to know about the places where everybody goes. I want to find out about new and exciting places. Places where people don't want to go because they are too rough and rugged.

But, of course, if people wrote books about those places in their tourist travel books they wouldn't sell.

So, where do you go to find out about the places that aren't popular? I don't know, but tourist books are a start anyway. So for now while I try to find a better source, I will be up on the left hand corner of the Muscatine Library reading about famous cities.