For the Armchair Traveler in Need of a Last Minute Vacation

Susan Orlean embodies the the travel journalist with her book of essays entitled My Kind of Place: Travel Stories From a Woman Who's Been Everywhere. She travels to Paris, features the African music scene, attends World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois. In each place she finds people worth knowing about and a world you did not realize that it was out there.






Marlena de Blasi is a chef who goes to Venice to explore and experience the cuisine that region has to offer. She ends up in a life changing romance in A Thousand Days in Venice. A lush tale for a beautiful city.

The Lost Girls: Three Friends, Four Continents, One Unconventional Detour Around the World by 

Jennifer Baggett, Holly C. Corbett, and Amanda Pressner is next on our list. This is the tale of three friends at a crossroads in their twenties quit their high pressure New York media jobs, leave their friends and everything familiar behind, and embark on a year-long backpacking adventure around the world. 

Alice Steinbach is a journalist from the Baltimore Sun who goes on sabbatical. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the nature of independence, chronicling her own adventures as a woman in search of freedom from the things that define her as she journeys to Paris, Oxford, Milan, and beyond. Her book is Without Reservations: the Travels of an Independent Woman.

Frances Mayes is well known for her book Under the Tuscan Sun. However in her other title,  A Year in the World, she travels a month at a time - each to a different location. Once month it is Spain, the next it could be England. Each time they travel, she and her companion try to live in the community that they are exploring. Her descriptions of food and the beauty of her surroundings will have you planning your next journey.