Book: Le Road Trip: A Traveler’s Journal of Love and France by Vivian Swift
Genre: Illustrated journal
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 2012

Source: Hardback book borrowed from the library

Summary: Vivian Swift traveled to France with her new husband in September 2005. Le Road Trip is an illustrated journal of the journey.

Throughout the book, Swift compares the experience of travel with the experience of love. The processes have similar phases like Anticipation, The Honeymoon Phase, and The Going Gets Tough.

Here, for example, is the introduction to The Infatuation phase:

To a traveler, every arrival is as if on a distant planet–that’s why we travel. To arrive as a new being in a new world, a world that will let us start over, as a better self, the person we’ve always wanted to be. That special joy that lights up our heart as we gaze at that new world with wild surmise? It’s a lot like love at first sight. (p. 14)

Thoughts: I’ve been looking forward to Le Road Trip since Jeanie mentioned this title after I finished Swift’s book When Wanderers Cease to Roam. I saved it for Paris in July!

Le Road Trip is hand-written and charmingly illustrated with line drawings and water colors. Such a beautiful way to present France! We get to see so many quaint doorways, robust bottles and glasses of wine, and pretty gardens and countryside.

Have you read Le Road Trip? What did you think