Book review: 36 Hours: USA & Canada
The first thing I look for in a travel guidebook is how it describes places that I know well. If it's good, it will recommend some of the sites, restaurants and activities I send my friends to, and it will also tell me something I don't know about a place I know well.
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The first thing I look for in a travel guidebook is how it describes places that I know well. If it's good, it will recommend some of the sites, restaurants and activities I send my friends to, and it will also tell me something I don't know about a place I know well.
I grew up near Winnipeg, for example, and I didn't know the city has a good sushi restaurant until I read . The book also suggests a walking tour of the city's often overlooked old French quarter, and I can confirm the Manitoba Museum does have a really cool old ship, as the book says - although it doesn't mention my brother worked on it.
is just one of the guidebooks - other destinations include European cities - that have grown out of ' column, which has been offering dream weekends away since 2002. The newspaper also has a series of videos on its YouTube feed.
Travel guides are not meant to offer step-by-step instructions, although bad ones are written that way, and unimaginative people use them that way. They are meant to spark ideas and dreams, and help string together journeys. They hint at what you might find or why you might go and then leave you to it. This guidebook does just that.
This isn't a book for planning a vacation; it's not a country guide. This is a book for people who make frequent road trips, for truckers, for business people who are marooned in cities on long weekends, a book to be taken in small doses.
This book is too heavy to carry if you don't have your own vehicle. You can't pop it into your bag when you go walkabout, but its linen-like soft cover makes it comfortable to the touch, suitable to be laid open on your lap while you sit in a car, contemplating where to go next or looking at the many photographs.
And it will still look good after thousands of kilometres and being left to fade on the rear dashboard of your car, just in case.
