I’m a member of two book clubs.  Both groups have been together for years.  We’ve bonded with Jane Austen, argued about Anna Karenina and struggled down The Road with Cormac McCarthy.  We’ve praised and panned books, hosted their authors at our meetings and attended readings in bookstores. We’ve analyzed authors’ possibly dysfunctional origins (seriously, how can you look at the world that way?), literary styles, symbolism and deep meaning of the books we’ve read.  Okay, not all the time.

I admit that our meetings have not always been devoted to highbrow literary discussion. We’ve eaten acres of dessert and consumed vineyards of wine. Our children, who were upstairs trying to sleep during these meetings, will attest to the noise level. In addition to our love of literature and reading, we’ve shared our lives—children, marriages and relationships, aging parents.  And now we’re adding another chapter—travel.

One group in particular has talked for years about how much fun it would be to actually see a place that we’ve read about.  “We should all go there…for our 30^th birthdays, for our 40^th birthdays…. This year we finally did it. We hopped on a plane from Minneapolis to Chicago, the scene of several of the books we’ve read, in particular Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City.  More about that wonderful trip later.

The more I tell people about our trip, the more I hear about how their book clubs, too, have started to travel together—both close-to-home “field trips” and longer, more exotic excursions.  There seems to be a trend here.  So, this blog will explore the places where literature and travel intersect, how to escape with a good book and understand the places we travel, with or without a book group, through the eyes of authors who have gone there before us.

Let’s get out of the living room and hit the road.