The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel / Rachael Antony

I got a huge kick out of The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel by Rachael Antony and Joel Henry (call # is 910.202 ANTONY). For those of you not already familiar with the Lonely Planet series of travel guides (by the way, we have bunches in the library if you're interested), they tend to target the more adventurous, less traditional sort of traveller. Nevertheless, most of them are pretty traditional in format, focusing on a single place or area, providing information on where to stay, what to do when you arrive, how to arrange transportation to your destination, etc. This book is entirely different, however.

Taking the creed of "anti-tourism" (which frankly, I never before knew existed), it offers a series of travel games or "experiments" to get you where you're going and then occupy your time once you're there. A few examples are: go to a new city, borrow a dog and let the dog take you on a walk; choose your hotel based not on its amenities but from the view from your hotel window; honor the second-highest mountain on earth (called K-2) by selecting a map at random and visiting the place located at the square K-2 on the map's grid. All of the travel exercises are designed to make their adherents look at the world around them with a new perspective.

While I don't know if I would actually use this book to plan my vacation, I had a great time reading through all of the exercises and imagining where I'd end up if I did. It's definitely worth picking up.