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Meet the cast of Travel Guides 2024

Travel Guides is back for a new season – and so are your favourite cast members!

From the picturesque mountains of Nepal to the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, the seventh season of the beloved travel show has already delivered its fair share of enviable experiences and hilarious moments.

Alongside Travel Guides’ once-in-a-lifetime itineraries, our favourite friendly faces will also be returning to our screens alongside a few new globe-trotting friends.

As they prepare for their next adventure, scroll down to meet the cast of Travel Guides for 2024.

Karli and Bri

Joining Travel Guides on the road for the first time are Karly and Bri, two besties who met while filming  Beauty and the Geek  for Nine a couple of years ago and have been inseparable ever since.

“We were roommates on the show, so we had no choice but to be friends,” Bri told our sister site TV WEEK. “We were like the love story from  Beauty And The Geek … we walked out best of friends.”

“We bring a different dynamic to the show, and I think people will be pleasantly surprised by us. We might look a certain way on the outside – we like to dress up and look nice – but we also give everything a crack. We are tomboys at heart.”

Matt and Brett

Bona fide travel addicts Matt and Brett joined the show in season four, hailing from Newcastle in New South Wales.

The married couple, who have been together for 20 years now, describe themselves as ‘high-end travellers’ who also love a bargain.

While Matt is organised, and packs his outfits into plastic bags via the suitcase, Brett is much happier going along for the ride, leading to a delightful Bert-and-Ernie energy that makes for great TV.

They’re also hilarious, giving biting commentary, and always making the audience laugh.

The Fren Family

The delightful Fren family have been regulars since season one, bringing immediate joy to the show with their upbeat nature.

Dad Mark is upbeat and forthright, with a knack for negotiating room upgrades. He’s been married to his wife Cathy for over 30 years, and their two kids, Victoria and Jonathan, are always along for the journey.

Their family grew in 2023, with Jonathan marrying his long-term partner, Danielle Clarke.

Other members of the Travel Guides cast Matt, Brett, Kevin, Janetta, Mel, and Stack were all in attendance – too cute!

Kevin and Janetta

‘Holiday snobs’ Kevin and Janetta always bring the laughs.

The pair, who are in their 60s, are passionate wine enthusiasts and seasoned travellers. They’re also avid researchers when it comes to their holidays, making sure they have the best possible experience, so being thrown into strange situations on the show always makes for a good laugh.

They also won’t hesitate to ask for the manager, which has earned them the catchphrase, “We don’t suffer in silence”.

Kev, Dorian, and Teng

Besties Kev, Dorian, and Teng love food, computer games, movies, and music.

Kev is a pop-culture expert, Dorian studies teaching, and Teng is the risk-taker, who keeps deferring university in the hopes of finding a good time.

Their combined heritage spans China, Greece and Vietnam, giving them a unique take on the world when it comes to the show.

Travel Guides Season 7 airs Sundays at 7:00 pm on Nine and 9Now.

Erin Christie is a writer at WHO (digital), keeping across pop culture, reality TV (especially Survivor), and the occasional fashion trend.

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6 years ago

Denise Scott may well be voicing Channel 9's  Travel Guides commentary from an armchair, but the veteran comedy queen is quite the seasoned traveller – in fact, her job as a presenter and performer has taken her to some exotic – and, erm, not-so-exotic – far-flung pockets of the globe.

With season 2 now well underway, 9Honey Travel caught up with the funny-woman to talk most memorable travel destinations, and find out which of our Travel Guides she enjoys watching most – or maybe even sees a little bit of herself in.

1. Have your travels around Australia as a comedienne taken you to any unique places?

I was doing a government-funded comedy tour for drought-stricken farming towns in western Queensland and consequently ended up in a town called Meandarra; population 100.

I met a local woman who was so excited to see me she nearly fainted. "Oh Denise, I can't believe you're in our little town. Oh, I just love you. I've watched you on TV. I've read your books..." I said: "So are you coming to the gig tonight?" She said: "Nah." What's more, the gig was free!

2. Favourite holidays spots?

I love Point Lonsdale, a seaside town in Victoria – it has an old-fashioned, quiet, family-fun vibe. And I LOVE Oman – a marvellous country of moonscape vistas, vast sand dunes and lush oases filled with date palms. And the Omani people are superb.

3. Which family would be your travel match?

Given my love of drinking wine and loathing of extreme physical activities it would have to be Kevin and Jeanetta, aka the "snobs".

READ: TV travel 'snobs' talk Bali and 'bogans'

4. Do you have any favourite Travel Guides from this season? 

I'm loving the Fren family. For all their claims of being the "fat family" who hate physical activity they're actually always up for doing anything and everything. I love their 'team' like spirit and constant laughter.

5. What's the best and worst traits to have as a traveller?

Best travelling trait: curiosity. Worst travelling trait: whinging.

6. Of the destinations covered in season 2, where are you gunning to visit?

I loved South Africa. It looks amazing. Then again, for sheer wonder and beauty, North Queensland is hard to beat. But oh, the skiing in New Zealand... and the food in Italy... I want to go to them all!

Travel Guides air on the Nine Network at 9pm. Catch up on the latest episodes on 9Now.

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Travel Guides - Full Cast & Crew

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Five ordinary British households review some of the world's most popular holiday destinations. Each week, the same people sample identical holidays and then describe their experiences, reporting on everything from accommodation to food and activities.

Travel Guides: “I’d rather be a snob, than a bogan”

Drinks in hand, enjoying jetsetting, but kevin & janetta have no issue with how they are portrayed on nine's travel guides..

• Published by David Knox
• on April 18, 2023
• Filed under News , Top Stories

Intrepid travellers Kevin Moloney & Janetta Stones recently finished filming their 7th season of Travel Guides for Nine.

In a joint interview the retired couple spoke with TV Tonight about their time on the hit Nine series, proudly toasting the finer things in life and acknowledging how their reviews provide a perfect contrast to other cast reviews.

How were you cast?

Janetta: I saw an ad on Channel Nine that said, ‘If you can give up three months next year, and you like traveling, apply here.’ We’d just retired at that stage so I said to Kevin we should apply, and he said…

Kevin: ‘What would they want with old things like us?’

Janetta: So that was my cue to go down the track and apply.

Kevin: We didn’t know anything about the show but we saw an episode of the British Travel Guides and we thought, ‘Oh, God, what have we got ourselves into? It looked pretty terrible!’

The Australian version is very different, thankfully. So we were thrilled to get involved in the first series. And then it just grew its own legs, and here we are at Season 7.

How do you feel about the way the show portrays you?

Janetta: We come across exactly as we are in real life. We like the nice things of life.

Kevin: We’re are a bit older, a bit more discerning them than some of the others. In the first season they introduced us as ‘Travel Snobs.’ But we’re fine with that.

Janetta: If it means we don’t like camping, we prefer to go business class, five stars, like fine food and wine, that’s what it is.

I’d rather be a snob than a bogan, but we’re not snobs by any stretch of the imagination. We just know what we like, and what we don’t.

Kevin: Nothing is scripted. No words are put into our mouths. If we don’t like something, we’re free to say we don’t like it. But I think that’s what people can relate to.

Janetta: We have fans in the street quite literally from 8 to 80. People will say that ‘You’re just like my parents,’ or ‘I want to be like you when I get older.’

What have been some of the more memorable things you’ve done on the show?

Kevin: Last year, or the year before, I jumped out of a plane. Now, I would never think of doing that on a holiday. So there are situations you find yourself in and we end up liking some things that we would never have even tried.

Janetta: They juxtapose us against pretty much nearly all of the other groups, which makes makes the show what it is. What we like, they don’t.

Kevin: That’s the magic of the show. ….One of the places we went to was the Arctic Circle. Janetta doesn’t like the cold so somwehere like that wouldn’t really feature on our travels. But we absolutely loved it.

Janetta: It was so memorable, really, really incredible.

Tell us about behind the scenes, and how you shoot the show?

Janetta: We don’t know where we’re going until we actually get to the airport. We only get an email the night before telling us where we have to be, and what sort of clothes to wear. That’s very much against how we are, which is being very organised.

We could be doing anything from FinAir business class, that we did on our last trip, or we could be doing the Perth – London flight, middle seat, third back row in economy.

Kevin: For 17 hours solid. That was pretty close to torture.

Janetta: We quite often will use our points or money to upgrade.

Kevin: The older you get, the more comfort you need.

How much interaction do you have with the other cast?

Kevin: We all travel together. But on camera, we don’t have any interaction whatsoever. They’re doing their thing and we’re doing our thing, and we try not to influence each other.

We don’t talk about the experiences we do together. So if, say the Fren family or the Target boys or Stack & Mel, have a certain opinion on an activity, our opinion might be different. So we don’t want to influence them with our opinion, and they won’t influence us with theirs

What is your essential item to take on aeroplane?

Kevin: Noise cancelling headphones.

Janetta: I have an e-reader with me.

Kevin: It really depends on what class you’re in, and the how long the flight is. Some people take neck pillows, all that sort of rubbish. I try to have the least amount of stuff around me when I’m on an aeroplane. I hate stuff on the floor and all over the place. The less I have the better.

Where do you travel to this season?

Kevin: We did 10 episodes. We went to Europe twice, Africa twice.

Janetta: We only did two episodes in Australia in Melbourne and the Riverina, but also South Africa, Zambia, England, Scotland, Croatia, Helsinki, Borneo, Vanuatu, New Zealand. Pretty much for 4 months we aren’t on any particular timezone.

Kevin: You come back from Europe or the Americas or wherever, and you’re only home for two or three days. There’s no way you get back into your home timezone. So you’re just floating for 4-5 months.

Janetta: Croatia was absolutely beautiful.

Kevin: We saw a different side of Croatia than we had in our last trip, which was our own holiday a few years ago. Travel Guides took us to different places in Croatia, which was sensational. But for me it was probably Lapland (Finland)…..to be knee deep in freshly powdered snow was an experience that I’ll never forget.

Have you ever met narrator Denise Scott?

Kevin: No. I’d like to, I like Denise, she does a great job.

It’s now 7 seasons, how long do you see yourselves doing the show?

Janetta: Each series we get home and we say ‘Never again.’ But I think it must be like childbirth. I’m terrible at the time on that flight home. But once it’s over you forget about it, and you’re ready to go again.

Travel Guides returns 7:30pm Wednesday on Nine.

• Tagged with Travel Guides

13 Responses

Love this show and all the participants…..their differences make it what it is….👌

Very good amateur actors, get paid to overact and over dramatise, but people like watching it🤦‍♂️

Interesting behind the scenes look at Travel Guides. Thanks, Mr. Knox.

The casting on this show is the best, it’s a great mixture of different people who like different things and but they’re all so likeable and great personalities, there’s not one person I don’t like!!

The differing personalities makes the show.

Love the show and Janetta and Kevin are my favorites. To me they are the least irritable and make the most sense in their evaluation of the places they visit (not like the ‘over the top’ Fren family – where I turn down the sound when they are on – LOL)

I think you hit the nail on the head regarding the appeal of Kevin and Janetta, they say it as it is and provide really useful feedback on their stay, which is why they are my favourite too. I also quite like the Target boys as everything seems to be so new to them, it’s like watching them grow as people.

I really enjoy Kevin and Janetta too, they are entertaining and perhaps share a similar perspective, I like some of the nice things too, but am younger and can’t necessarily afford them!

Not snobs at all, nor old things (age is only how you feel) just sensible people who enjoy travelling and a bit of luxury. They don’t try to outdo each other with the comedy, they certainly don’t put each other down because they are afraid to partake in an activity unlike some on the show and they certainly don’t make Australians look like bad tourists with OTT antics.

I love these two! They give great balance to Travel Guides! Love this show (it’s one of my favorites) and I’m realling looking forward to the return on Wednesday!

The british version has a snobby couple as well.

the british show has not been on since 2015 ….

Love this show,so glad it’s back for another season.

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Karly and Bri

The Fren Family

Kevin and Janetta

The Boys: Kev, Dorian and Teng

Matt and Brett

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Everything you need to know about the Travel Guides cast

Travel Guides is one of Australia’s most beloved television shows, and with its  crazy adventures and hilarious reviews, it’s not hard to see why.

WATCH BELOW: Travel Guides: The Fren family visit a farm

Channel Nine’s   Travel Guides   has taken off this year, with the reality show seeing everyday holidayers act as travel critics.

The very different groups of ordinary Aussies go on the same week-long holiday – reviewing the cuisine, accommodation, activities and local sights, where they tell it how they see it.

So, here’s everything that you need to know about this season’s cast.

Matt and Brett

New to the block are Matt and Brett, who have been together for 18 years and married for seven.

Matt, 45, works for the local council while Brett, 51, is a primary school teacher, and the two love to travel – meaning they have a lot of opinions on how holidays should be.

The difference between the two is that while Matt loves to organise everything, do everything and eat out for every meal, Brett is happy to go along for the ride.

They are quick with biting commentary on everything around them but are generous, kind and love a laugh. 

Fren family

The Frens are well equipped to cope with stressful family situations and can always find the funny side of any holiday disaster.

Mark, 59, is the upbeat and forthright dad, so when on holiday he loves to negotiate hotel room upgrades.

For more than 30 years he has been happily married to Cathy, 57, whose quirky sense of humour and distinctive laugh is contagious.

Together they have two kids, Victoria, 27, who is always ready to voice an opinion, and Jonathon, 29, who is the more reserved one of the bunch.

The Frens are unafraid to give anything a go, which often leads them into unpredictable situations.

Kev, Dorian, and Teng

This trio, made up of Kev, Dorian and Teng, are all good mates who share a love of junk food, computer games, music and movies. 

Kev, 28, is the sensible pop-culture expert with an arts degree, while Dorian, 24, is laidback, polite and studying to become a teacher.

As for Teng, 25, he’s the risk-taker who has deferred uni for the last three years and is always looking for a good time.

All are Australian-born and their combined Chinese, Greek and Vietnamese heritage gives them a unique take on the world.

Despite Dorian’s Greek heritage, they often refer to themselves as “the three Asian boys” who are fearless and willing to give anything a go.

Kevin and Janetta

Kevin, 63, and Janetta, 69, describe themselves as ‘holiday snobs’, as they want the best of the best for everything.

The pair, who have been married for over three decades, don’t have children, and are passionate wine enthusiasts.

They also love exploring big cities, but before hitting the road, they make sure they do their research to ensure they experience the best holiday.

And if the quality or service isn’t up to scratch they will not hesitate to make a complaint – earning them the “we don’t suffer in silence” catchphrase.

Stack and Mel

Identical twin cowgirls, Stack and Mel, are still relatively new to the travel game, and are a little wary when venturing anywhere beyond the Outback. Even so, they are willing to give anything a crack.

The girls, 31, are big on the rodeo scene, competing together and against each other in roping events. They have travelled extensively around country Australia for competitions.

Having spent most of their lives in the bush, they are blissfully unaware of other cultures, languages and customs – but this doesn’t stop them voicing an opinion.

They are used to roughing it and are not easily impressed by fancy holidays, and would much rather camp outdoors with their horses and dogs rather than stay in the city.

Chanelle is the Shopping & Streaming Editor across a broad portfolio of digital brands, including ELLE, Marie Claire, WHO, Now To Love and more. With a background in entertainment and lifestyle, she loves any excuse to talk about her latest celebrity crush, what’s trending on #BookTok and the latest watercooler show she’s obsessing over.

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GyPSy Guide is now GuideAlong

It’s never been easy to explain simply what GyPSy Guide is.

Sure, we’re GPS-enabled, fully automatic, perfectly timed driving tours that provide interesting, informative, and flexible road tripping, but we are so much more. Road trippers like you tell us this all the time!

But the one thing customers say they love the most about our tours is— it’s like having a tour guide along for the drive. So, we’re changing our name to reflect the most important part of who we are.

Introducing our new name:

Your favorite narrator on every tour is the same, and so is our passionate team behind the scenes, who create all those road-worthy stories and recommendations.

Any purchased tours & bundles remain yours and are found in the My Tours menu.

And to make your road trips EXTRA special in 2023…

Oh, and another exciting piece of news! We’re creating new tours this year and releasing them throughout the road trip season.

We’ll be ready to share the new locations soon. Check your inbox in the coming weeks, you’ll be the first to know.

We can’t wait to to be your GuideAlong on your next road trip.

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Meet the Moderator: Dana Bash.

What you need to know about CNN’s chief political correspondent.

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By Michael M. Grynbaum

• June 27, 2024

Dana Bash is one of the two moderators of Thursday’s presidential debate, along with Jake Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent. Their ability to guide and navigate the event may be crucial to how President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump — and CNN, which is hosting the debate — are received by the public. Here is what you need to know about Ms. Bash.

Job: Chief political correspondent, CNN. Anchor, “Inside Politics.”

Bio: Ms. Bash is a CNN lifer, starting as a producer shortly after graduating from college. She became a lead congressional and White House correspondent and then a fixture of the network’s election coverage; she has reported on presidential races dating back to 2000. In 2023, Ms. Bash became anchor of the midday program “Inside Politics”; she also hosts a series called “Badass Women of Washington.”

Debates: Ms. Bash was a questioner at six of seven primary debates sponsored by CNN in 2016. She also moderated two CNN Democratic primary debates in 2020.

Style: Unlike some boisterous figures in cable news, Ms. Bash can be a more reserved presence on the air. She keeps the fireworks for her analysis, often providing pithy and incisive summaries of major political events moments after they unfold.

What to Watch For: While Mr. Trump has made clear his animosity toward Mr. Tapper, he has not said much about Ms. Bash. Since she has not been as directly in Mr. Trump’s cross hairs, she may help to defuse heated moments.

Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016. More about Michael M. Grynbaum

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The Top Ten Most Influential Travel Books

Even before there were armchairs, voracious bookworms traveled the world just by reading

Tony Perrottet

Contributing writer

William H.H. Murray's guidebook to the Adirondacks “kindled a thousand camp fires and taught a thousand pens how to write of nature,” inspiring droves of American city-dwellers to venture into the wild and starting a back-to-nature movement that endures to this day. Of course, Murray's slender volume was part of a great literary tradition. For more than two millennia, travel books have had enormous influence on the way we have approached the world, transforming once-obscure areas into wildly popular destinations.

A detailed selection would fill a library. So what follows is a brazenly opinionated short-list of travel classics—some notorious, some barely remembered—that have inspired armchair travelers to venture out of their comfort zone and hit the road. 

1. Herodotus, Histories (c.440 BC)

Homer's Odyssey is often referred to as the first travel narrative, creating the archetypal story of a lone wanderer, Odysseus, on a voyage filled with mythic perils, from terrifying monsters like the Cyclops to seductive nymphs and ravishing sorceresses. As may be.  But the first real “travel writer,” as we would understand the term today, was the ancient Greek author Herodotus, who journeyed all over the eastern Mediterranean to research his monumental Histories. His vivid account of ancient Egypt, in particular, created an enduring image of that exotic land, as he “does the sights” from the pyramids to Luxor, even dealing with such classic travel tribulations as pushy guides and greedy souvenir vendors. His work inspired legions of other ancient travelers to explore this magical, haunted land, creating a fascination that reemerged during the Victorian age and remains with us today. In fact, Herodotus qualifies not just as the Father of History, but the Father of Cultural Travel itself, revealing to the ancient Greeks—who rarely deemed a foreign society worthy of interest—the rewards of exploring a distant, alien world.

  2. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (c.1300)

When the 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo returned home after two decades wandering China, Persia and Indonesia, the stories he and his two brothers told were dismissed as outright fiction—until (legend goes) the trio sliced open the hems of their garments, and hundreds of gems poured to the ground in a glittering cascade. Still, Polo's adventure might have remained all but unknown to posterity if an accident had not allowed him to overcome his writer's block: Imprisoned by the Genoans in 1298 after a naval battle, he used his enforced leisure time to dictate his memoirs to his cellmate, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa. The resulting volume, filled with marvelous observations about Chinese cities and customs and encounters with the potentate Kublai Khan (and including, admittedly, some outrageous exaggerations), has been a bestseller ever since, and indelibly defined the Western view of the Orient. There is evidence that Polo intended his book to be a practical guide for future merchants to follow his path. The vision of fabulous Chinese wealth certainly inspired one eager and adventurous reader, fellow Italian Christopher Columbus, to seek a new ocean route to the Orient. (Of course, Islamic scholars will point out that the 14 th -century explorer Ibn Battuta traveled three times as far as Polo around Africa, Asia and China, but his monumental work Rihla , “The Journey,” remained little known in the West until the mid-19th century).

3. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

When the author of Tristram Shandy penned this extraordinary autobiographical novel, the Grand Tour of Europe as a rite of passage was in full swing. Wealthy young British aristocrats (almost invariably male), took educational expeditions to the great cultural sites of Paris, Venice, Rome and Naples, seeking out the classical sites and Renaissance artworks in the company of an erudite “bear leader,” or tour guide. Sterne's rollicking book suddenly turned the sober Grand Tour principle on its head. The narrator deliberately avoids all the great monuments and cathedrals, and instead embarks on a personal voyage, to meet unusual people, seeking out new and spontaneous experiences: (“'tis a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE, and those affections which arise out of her, which make us love each other—and the world, better than we do.”) His meandering journey across France and Italy is filled with amusing encounters, often of an amorous nature (involving assorted chamber maids and having to share rooms in inns with member of the opposite sex), which prefigures the Romantic era's vision of travel as a journey of self-discovery. Even today, most “true travelers” pride themselves on finding vivid and unique experiences, rather than generic tourist snapshots or lazy escapes.

4. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

Writers of the Gilded Age (a term Mark Twain incidentally coined) produced thousands of earnest and tedious travel books, a tendency that Twain deftly deflated with Innocents Abroad. Sent as a journalist on a group cruise tour to see the great sights of Europe and the Holy Land, Twain filed a series of hilarious columns to the Alta California newspaper that he later reworked into this classic work. With its timely, self-deprecating humor, it touched a deep chord, lampooning the naïveté of his fellow Americans (“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad”) and the modest indignities of exploring the sophisticated Old World (“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”) The result was to embolden many more of his fellow countrymen to fearlessly cross the pond and immerse themselves in Europe, and, hardly less importantly, to begin a new style of comic travel writing that echoes today through hugely popular modern authors such as Bill Bryson. Today, Innocents Abroad is one of the few 19th-century travel books that is still read eagerly for pleasure. (Its perfect companion is, of course, Roughing It , Twain's account of his misspent youth as a miner in the wild American West).

5. Norman Douglas, Siren Land (1911)

The Italian island of Capri began its proud reputation for licentiousness in ancient Roman times, and by the mid-19 century was luring free-living artists, writers and bon vivants from chilly northern climes. (It was even said that Europe had two art capitals, Paris and Capri). But its modern reputation was sealed by the libertine writer Norman Douglas, whose volume Siren Land offered an account of the carefree southern Italian life “where paganism and nudity and laughter flourished,” an image confirmed by his 1917 novel South Wind , where the island is called Nepenthe, after the ancient Greek elixir of forgetfulness . (Siren Land gets its title from Homer’s Odyssey; Capri was the home of the Sirens, ravishing women who lured sailors to their deaths by shipwreck with their magical voices). Millions of sun-starved British readers were captivated by the vision of Mediterranean sensuality and Douglas' playful humor. (“It is rather puzzling when one comes to think of it,” he writes, “to conceive how the old Sirens passed their time on days of wintry storm. Modern ones would call for cigarettes, Grand Marnier, and a pack of cards, and bid the gale howl itself out.”) Douglas himself was flamboyantly gay, and liked to scamper drunkenly around Capri’s gardens with vine leaves in his hair. Thanks largely to his writings, the island in the 1920s entered a new golden age, luring exiles disillusioned by post-war Europe. The visitors included many great British authors who also penned travel writing classics, such as D.H. Lawrence (whose marvelous Etruscan Places covers his travels in Italy; Lawrence also showed drafts of the torrid Lady Chatterly’s Lover to friends while on holiday in Capri in 1926), E.M Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and W.H. Auden. (The renowned poet wrote a travel volume on Iceland, of all places). The collective vision of Mediterranean freedom has inspired generations of travelers to those warm shores ever since.

6. Freya Stark, The Valley of the Assassins (1934)

The Victorian age produced a surprising number of adventurous women travel writers—Isabella Bird, for instance, wrote about exploring Hawaii, the Rocky Mountains and China—but the authors were regarded as rare and eccentric exceptions rather than role models by female readers. In the more liberated era of the 1930s, Freya Stark's tome revealed just how far women could travel alone and live to write about it. Her breakthrough book, The Valley of the Assassins , was a thrilling account of her journey through the Middle East. Its highlight was her visit to the ruined stronghold of the Seven Lords of Alamut, a medieval cult of hashish-eating political killers in the Elburz Mountains of Iran whose exploits had been legendary in the West since the Crusades. (The singular escapade made her one of the first women ever inducted into the Royal Geographical Society.) The bestseller was followed by some two dozen works whose freshness and candor inspired women to venture, if not by donkey into war zones, at least into exotic climes. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world,” she enthused in Baghdad Sketches . “You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.”

7. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

This thinly veiled autobiographical novel, about a group of young friends hitch-hiking and bumming their way across the United States, has inspired generations of restless readers to take a leap into the unknown. Although the publisher made Kerouac change the actual names (Kerouac became Sal Paradise, the wild driver Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty and poet Allen Ginsberg became Carlo Marx), its episodes were almost entirely drawn from life, qualifying it as a classic of travel writing. It was also a cultural phenomenon: Kerouac legendarily hammered out the whole lyrical work on a giant scroll of paper (possibly on one speed-induced binge), and carried it about in his rucksack for years before it was published, becoming an instant icon of the rebellious “beat” era, thumbing its nose at the leaden conformity of the cold war era. Today, it is still a dangerous book to read at an impressionable age (at least for younger males; women tend to be left out of the boyish pursuits, except as sex objects). The delirious sense of freedom as Kerouac rides across the wheat fields of Nebraska in the back of a farm truck or speeds across the Wyoming Rockies toward Denver is infectious.

8. Tony and Maureen Wheeler, Across Asia on the Cheap (1973)

It was one of history's great self-publishing success stories. When two young travelers roughed it in a minivan from London to Sydney, they decided to write a practical guide about their experiences. Working on a kitchen table, they typed out a list of their favorite budget hotels and cheap restaurants from Tehran to Djakarta, stapled the copied pages together into a 90-page booklet and sold it for $1.80 a pop. Their instincts were correct: There was a huge hunger for information on how to travel on a budget in the Third World, and the modest booklet sold 1,500 copies in a week. The hit became the basis for Lonely Planet, a vast guidebook empire with books on almost every country on earth. The young and financially challenged felt welcomed into the exotic corners of Nepal, Morocco and Thailand, far from the realm of five-star hotels and tour groups, often for a few dollars a day. The guidebooks' power quickly became such that in many countries, a recommendation is still enough to make a hotelier's fortune. (Having sold 100 million copies of their guidebooks, the Wheelers finally sold Lonely Planet for £130 million in 2010 to the BBC. (The BBC recently confirmed plans to sell the franchise to NC2 Media at a loss for just £51.5 million. Nobody ever claimed Across Asia was high literature, but the Wheelers now help fund a literary institution, The Wheeler Center, in their home city of Melbourne, Australia, to promote serious fiction and non-fiction). 

9. Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (1977)

Along with Paul Theroux's wildly entertaining Great Railway Bazaar , Chatwin's slim, enigmatic volume became widely credited with the modern rebirth of travel writing. A former Sotheby's art auctioneer, the erudite Chatwin famously quit the London Sunday Times Magazine via telegram to his editor (“Have gone to Patagonia”) and disappeared into the then little-known and remote tip of South America. In a stylistic first for the genre, In Patagonia weaves a personal quest (for a piece of prehistoric skin of the mylodon, which the author had seen as a child) with the region's most surreal historical episodes, related in a poetic, crisp and laconic style. Focusing on god-forsaken outposts rather than popular attractions, Chatwin evokes the haunting ambiance with deftly drawn vignettes from Patagonia's storybook past, such as how Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lived in a cabin in southern Argentina, or how a Welsh nationalist colony was begun in the windswept town of Trelew. And thus the quirky travel pilgrimage was born.

  10. Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence (1989)

Mayle's breezy account of his mid-life decision to escape dark and sodden England to renovate a farmhouse in Ménerbes, a village in the south of France, created an entire sub-genre of do-it-yourself travel memoirs filled with charmingly quirky locals. It also inspired thousands to physically emulate his life-changing project, flooding Provence and other sunny idylls with expats in search of a rustic fixer-upper and supplies of cheap wine. Aided by the relaxed residency laws of the European Union, discount airlines and France's super-fast TGV trains, the once-impoverished southern France quickly became gentrified by retirees from Manchester, Hamburg and Stockholm, until it is now, in the words of one critic, a “bourgeois theme park for foreigners.” (Tuscany became equally popular, thanks to Frances Mayes' beguiling books, with the shores of Spain and Portugal following suit). Things got so crowded that Mayle himself moved out – although he has since returned to a different tiny village, Lourmarin, a stone's throw from his original haunt. In recent years, Elizabeth Gilbert's wildly successful Eat Pray Love (2007) offered a similar spirit of personal reinvention, inspiring a new wave of travelers to follow her  path to the town of Ubud in Bali in search of spiritual (and romantic) fulfillment

A Smithsonian Magazine Contributing Writer, Tony Perrottet is the author of five travel and history books, including Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists and The Sinner's Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe; www.tonyperrottet.com

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Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times and WSJ Magazine , and the author of six books including ¡Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel and the Improbable Revolution that Changed World History , The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games and Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped . Follow him on Instagram @TonyPerrottet .

Birds of a Feather

For Travel Writers with an Independent Spirit

Should you write a Travel Guide or a Travel Narrative?

Travel Guide vs. Travel Narrative

When you start looking at the tone and slant of your travel guide, one of the structural elements that you need to consider (after you’ve fully explored your travel guide concept) is decide whether you’re going to include any narrative elements into your book.

But don’t get too hung up on whether to include travel narrative in your travel guide too early on in your writing process. This distinction between Guide and Narrative is just something to have in the back of your mind as you start planning your travel guide.

Travel Guides:

Help readers find the best sights, activities, restaurants, hotels, and attractions for a given destination, and can be written to advise, share knowledge or inspire.

The Travel Narrative:

Entertains readers by allowing them to share, and experience, a travel destination through your eyes.

Hybrid Guides:

You can easily write a travel guide that blurs the lines a little, which includes some narrative elements into your travel guide.

Case Study: My Travel Guide mix

I wanted my travel guides to have the personal touch, and although they are primarily Travel Guides, I include personal recommendations and narratives to connect with my audience. This approach has been successful for me, and many of my Reader Reviews on Amazon have the common themes:

“just like sharing a journey with a friend”

“like listening to insider tips from a friend”

This is precisely the tone I was aiming for.

If you’re a travel blogger who wants to turn their travel blog into an ebook or paperback destination guide, leave me a comment below.

Read more articles in my How to Write a Travel Guide Series

I’m putting the finishing touches on my  How to Write and Self-Publish a Travel Guide Series , which details a step by step approach for writing and producing your own travel guide. It’s part of a four-part series aimed at helping travel bloggers achieve passive income based on their passions and existing content.

Each month I host a monthly free prize draw and give away a travel writing e-book to the lucky winner. Sign up to join my mailing list to participate.

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Author: Jay Artale

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I abandoned my corporate career to become a digital nomad and full-time writer, and now run Birds of a Feather Press to help other writers become authors. I also write about my travels on my personal blog Roving Jay: Nomadic Adventures in Wonderland – without the rose-tinted glasses

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When is the first 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Biden? Date, time, moderators, how to watch

President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump will face off for their first debate of the 2024 election cycle later this month.

CNN, the host of the June 27 debate in Atlanta , recently released additional rules: Both candidates' microphones will be muted until it is their turn to speak, and they won't be allowed to interact with campaign staff during the two commercial breaks.

Trump and Biden skirted the  Commission on Presidential Debates and opted for earlier debates this year. The second debate is scheduled for Sept. 10, hosted by ABC.

Here is everything you need to know about watching the first presidential debate:

Who is Dana Bash? What to know about the moderator ahead of the June Presidential Debate

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Who is Jake Tapper? What to know about the moderator ahead of the June Presidential Debate

When is the first Biden-Trump debate?

The first debate will be held on June 27, 2024.

What time is the presidential debate?

The CNN Presidential Debate will begin at 9 p.m. ET.

How can I watch the first debate between Trump and Biden?

CNN will host the first election debate between the two candidates in its Atlanta studio.

The debate will air live on CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español and CNN Max.

For those without a cable subscription, the debate will be streaming on CNN.com , the network said in a news release.

Looking for reliable local streaming options? Check out  USA TODAY Home Internet  for broadband service plans in your area.

Who are the moderators for the first Biden-Trump debate?

CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the debate.

Who is eligible to participate in the debates?

To qualify for participation, candidates must meet the following criteria, according to CNN:

• "Fulfill the requirements outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution
• "File a Statement of Candidacy with the Federal Election Commission
• "A candidate's name must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency prior to the eligibility deadline
• "Agree to accept the rules and format of the debate
• "Receive at least 15% in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters that meet CNN's standards for reporting."

It is unlikely that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  will meet the requirements to participate in the debate.

Want daily politics news in your inbox? Subscribe to OnPolitics for presidential debate takeaways and everything to know about the election.

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What You Should Know About Travel Writing

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the narrator's encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. Also called  travel literature .

"All travel writing—because it is writing—is made in the sense of being constructed, says Peter Hulme, "but travel writing cannot be made up without losing its designation" (quoted by Tim Youngs in  The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing , 2013).

Notable contemporary travel writers in English include Paul Theroux, Susan Orlean, Bill Bryson , Pico Iyer, Rory MacLean, Mary Morris, Dennison Berwick, Jan Morris, Tony Horwitz, Jeffrey Tayler, and Tom Miller, among countless others.

Examples of Travel Writing

• "By the Railway Side" by Alice Meynell
• Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There"
• Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description
• "London From a Distance" by Ford Madox Ford
• "Niagara Falls" by Rupert Brooke
• "Nights in London" by Thomas Burke
• "Of Trave," by Francis Bacon
• "Of Travel" by Owen Felltham
• "Rochester" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Observations About Travel Writing

Authors, journalists, and others have attempted to describe travel writing, which is more difficult to do than you might think. However, these excerpts explain that travel writing—at a minimum—requires a sense of curiosity, awareness, and fun.

Thomas Swick

• "The best writers in the field [of travel writing] bring to it an indefatigable curiosity, a fierce intelligence that enables them to interpret, and a generous heart that allows them to connect. Without resorting to invention , they make ample use of their imaginations. . . . "The travel book itself has a similar grab bag quality. It incorporates the characters and plot line of a novel, the descriptive power of poetry, the substance of a history lesson, the discursiveness of an essay , and the—often inadvertent—self-revelation of a memoir . It revels in the particular while occasionally illuminating the universal. It colors and shapes and fills in gaps. Because it results from displacement, it is frequently funny. It takes readers for a spin (and shows them, usually, how lucky they are). It humanizes the alien. More often than not it celebrates the unsung. It uncovers truths that are stranger than fiction. It gives eyewitness proof of life’s infinite possibilities." ("Not a Tourist." The Wilson Quarterly , Winter 2010)

Casey Blanton

• "There exists at the center of travel books like [Graham] Greene's Journey Without Maps or [V.S.] Naipaul's An Area of Darkness a mediating consciousness that monitors the journey, judges, thinks, confesses, changes, and even grows. This narrator , so central to what we have come to expect in modern travel writing , is a relatively new ingredient in travel literature, but it is one that irrevocably changed the genre . . . . "Freed from strictly chronological , fact-driven narratives , nearly all contemporary travel writers include their own dreams and memories of childhood as well as chunks of historical data and synopses of other travel books. Self reflexivity and instability, both as theme and style , offer the writer a way to show the effects of his or her own presence in a foreign country and to expose the arbitrariness of truth and the absence of norms." ( Travel Writing: The Self and the World . Routledge, 2002)

Frances Mayes

• "Some travel writers can become serious to the point of lapsing into good ol' American puritanism. . . . What nonsense! I have traveled much in Concord. Good travel writing can be as much about having a good time as about eating grubs and chasing drug lords. . . . [T]ravel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages." (Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2002 . Houghton, 2002)

Travel Writers on Travel Writing

In the past, travel writing was considered to be nothing more than the detailing of specific routes to various destinations. Today, however, travel writing has become much more. Read on to find out what famous travel writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux say about the profession.

V.S. Naipaul

• "My books have to be called ' travel writing ,' but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme . I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives." (Interview with Ahmed Rashid, "Death of the Novel." The Observer , Feb. 25, 1996)

Paul Theroux

• - "Most travel narratives—perhaps all of them, the classics anyway—describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography ; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing ." (Paul Theroux, "The Soul of the South." Smithsonian Magazine , July-August 2014) - "Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals. "Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. “I need the winter to rest my body,” my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April. . . ." ("The Wicked Coast." The Atlantic , June 2011)

Susan Orlean

• - "To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey , Chaucer, Ulysses —that isn't explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don't actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I've seen." (Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere . Random House, 2004) - "When I went to Scotland for a friend's wedding last summer, I didn't plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn't expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I don't know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didn't want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along. . . ." (Opening paragraph of "Shooting Party." The New Yorker , September 29, 1999)

Jonathan Raban

• - "As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the bed. It accommodates the private diary , the essay , the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing." ( For Love & Money: Writing - Reading - Travelling 1968-1987 . Picador, 1988)
• - "Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservation and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things, and put yourself in the way of whatever changes the journey may throw up. It's when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the pre-booked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name you've never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest." ("Why Travel?" Driving Home: An American Journey . Pantheon, 2011)
• Quotes About Being Alone—but Not Lonely
• A List of Every Nobel Prize Winner in English Literature
• 100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction
• What is Nature Writing?
• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• Creative Nonfiction
• First-Person Point of View
• Sports Writing as a Form of Creative Nonfiction
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• 11 Things You Should Know About Trees
• Definition and Examples of Humorous Essays

The 69 Greatest Fiction Travel Books of All Time

By Boris Kachka

First things first, you may be thinking: What is a fiction travel book, anyway? Well, here's what we think: It's a book in which a place is as important a character as the protagonist; it's a book so informed by the writer's culture that it's impossible to read it without uncovering the life of the author behind it; it's a book that has shaped the way we see a certain place; it's a book whose events and characters could be set nowhere else. So for everyone who, like Michael Ondaatje, got his first glimpse of Japan through Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country; or, like Nathan Englander, found India in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance; or discovered the world through Homer's Odyssey—this is the list to have. Read on.

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart (2006)

"It's probably the best contemporary travel novel," says Darin Strauss. "Certainly the most fun." The Russian immigrant's second book tops his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in screwball inventiveness, with a gluttonous character in the slothful tradition of Oblomov who (sometimes literally) flies over the Bronx and hails from an autonomous ex-Soviet republic that could exist only in Shteyngart's mind. "The sweep," Strauss says, "is matched only by the humor and exuberance of the prose" (Random House, $14).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain (1885)

Huck and Jim's "downstream education," as Jonathan Raban puts it, is important for numerous reasons, but alongside its lessons in the American vernacular and the history of race, there is the canonization of the Mississippi. "The idea of the river as America's first great interstate arterial highway, at once a place of magical solitude in nature and of fraught encounters with society, survives even now," says Raban (Bantam, $6).

The Alexandria Quartet

Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)

These four novels come as a set, with different perspectives on essentially the same forlorn story. They "play with time and point of view like a Charlie Kaufman script," says Darin Strauss, but "are worth reading not for their gimmickry—supposedly based on the theories of Einstein and Freud—but for their lush descriptions of Egypt. Durell was more famous as a poet than a novelist, and his pointillist evocations of Alexandria are breathtaking" (Penguin; set, $45).

Jim Crace (1992)

Inspired by London, the unnamed city of the master novelist's morality tale about a self-made millionaire and his utopian dreams almost upstages the Dickensian struggles at its heart. "There is so much life and strife and detail," says Amy Bloom. "An entire world has been conjured up, street by street, an imagined city with every cobblestone and desire and character made real" (out-of-print).

The Baron in the Trees

Italo Calvino (1977)

Imagine John Cheever's swimmer traveling via tree instead of suburban pool—for his entire life—and you have Calvino's fairy tale of an eighteenth-century Italian boy who climbs a tree one day and never comes down. Michael Ondaatje calls this world "a thrilling, unforgettable universe, beautifully evoked, completely real and believable—a landscape where there are great adventures and love affairs and politics and wars" (Harvest, $14).

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler (1939)

This caper redefined the city that W. H. Auden called "the great wrong place" and which Phillip Lopate dubs "the city that didn't want to be a city." Lopate loves that, contrary to its bright reputation, Chandler's Los Angeles is "portrayed as a very occult, secretive place." "Don't expect sunshine and palm trees," seconds David Ebershoff. "His L.A. is a shadowland—damp with fog, dark with night, and peopled with killers and cons" (Vintage, $14).

Prosper Mérimée (1841)

In the lamentably obscure French writer's most accomplished novel, a jaded colonel and his daughter journey to Corsica in search of untouched paradise, only to become immersed in international intrigue, culture clash, and a still-thriving ancient tradition of the vendetta. Fernanda Eberstadt calls it "a shrewd, dispassionate portrait of nineteenth-century Corsica" (Kessinger, $21).

Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage

Maria Thomas (1987)

This story collection is one of only three books by Thomas, who died in a 1989 plane crash en route to an Ethiopian refugee camp. Thomas wrote, "A language you don't understand reminds you how vulnerable you are," and it's through her writing and our own journeys, says Julia Alvarez, that "we discover that it is precisely this vulnerability which connects us with one another—a good enough reason to travel if nothing else" (Soho, $12).

Cousin Bette

Honoré de Balzac (1846)

Phillip Lopate says that his favorite Balzac novel, and what it has to say about life, are summarized in a single sentence from the book: "In the heart of Paris the close alliance between squalor and splendor…characterizes the queen of capitals." There's also Balzac's use of the courtesan, "the figure who threads her way through Paris and unites wealth and poverty by beauty." For this "cartographer of cities and societies," as Lopate calls him, the geography is just as important as the social intrigue (Oxford, $12).

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)

This map of the soul of modern man is also not too shabby at nailing St. Petersburg's crooked canals and alleyways. It inspires daily tours in the city, which has changed tremendously since the fall of communism—though not as much as you'd think. Francine Prose says that, beyond Nevsky Prospect and its Versace stores, "it's still the same. You feel Crime and Punishment all over the place" (Vintage, $16).

By Arati Menon

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By Steph Koyfman

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The Day of Judgment

Salvatorre Satta (1979)

Satta's posthumously published novel gets deep inside Sardinia at a time (a century ago) when it was a backwater, and his depiction of its "demoniacal sadness" is hardly the stuff of tourist brochures. Such inertia means a listless plot, but for Colin Thubron, the author's observations of "timeless, eccentric lives" make it worthy on its own terms (FSG, $14).

The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West (1939)

Drawing on West's stint as a screenwriter in Depression-era Hollywood, this iconic farce was fated to be repeated as noir in the Chandler era. "His L.A. is a hysteric pleasure dome that teems with grotesqueries and perversity," says Nathaniel Rich. "Ever since I read it, I can't go to L.A. without thinking of cockfighting" (Signet, $7).

Dead Lagoon

Michael Dibdin (1995)

This is the fifth in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mystery series but the first in which the investigator from Rome revisits his native town. "Venice is a marvel," says Jonathan Raban. "A familiar place rendered strange and foreboding by the author's intimate familiarity with its streets—no gondolas for the pedestrian Zen. I greatly admire Thomas Mann, but it's the Venice of Dead Lagoon that I walk in my Italian dreams" (Vintage, $14).

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann (1912)

Tied for second place on our list of most-nominated books, this dark classic of pederast obsession resonates brilliantly with its setting. "Gray Venice in the high season, with its humid air and empty corridors, amplifies the story's meaning by a thousand," says David Ebershoff. "This small book is both a warning and a love letter to Venice and all who long to travel there. Heartbreak, decay, lethal regret? Sign me up." Also nominated by: Francine Prose, Jennifer Belle (HarperPerennial, $13).

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes (1605)

How many travelers, seduced by fictional narratives, have flown to exotic destinations only to discover how comically pedestrian and daunting life can be no matter where they go? Quixote, besotted as he was with tales of chivalry, was the first to do that—even if it took a bit longer, in his case, for disillusion to set in. Nominated by: Matthew Sharpe (Penguin, $12).

The Epic of Gilgamesh

(circa 2500 B.C.)

There are many translations of the world's oldest epic poem (sorry, Homer), but Julia Alvarez recommends Herbert Mason's version of the story, in which the titular great king, inconsolable over a friend's death, goes off in search of "immortality and a way to keep loss at bay." Alvarez likes the tip he gets from a barmaid, "good advice for any traveler: 'Fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice' " (Mariner, $9).

Far Tortuga

Peter Matthiessen (1975)

Perhaps better known as a phenomenal travel memoirist, Matthiessen also wrote fiction as adventurous as its hardscrabble characters. In this elegy for a dying ecology and a dying livelihood, a boatful of turtle fishermen roam across the overfished Bahamas, riffing one another in pidgin dialects between encounters with near disaster and modern pirates. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $17).

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry (1995)

Mistry manages his own fine balance between detail and scope in this Mumbai-set novel. "Few have taken us beneath India's intense surfaces and into its forgotten streets with the quiet, patient care of its native son," says Pico Iyer. "Going on a train ride with Mistry is amazing," adds Nathan Englander. "You can feel the people packed in and the lunch tins and the swarming city. It could be among my top five books of the last 25 years" (Vintage, $16).

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway (1940)

This taciturn tale of stoic warriors ground down by the Spanish Civil War reminds us, says Peter Hessler, that "Hemingway was a remarkable landscape writer. Sometimes this can be forgotten because we tend to focus on other—and more easily parodied—subjects and interests" (Scribner, $15).

Good Morning, Midnight

Jean Rhys (1939)

Decades before the Caribbean-born British writer became acclaimed for Wide Sargasso Sea, she evoked Paris through a glass very darkly in this first-person tale of a woman's melancholy return to the city. "This book transports me to Paris like no other book can," says Jennifer Belle. "In fact, I feel more like I'm in Paris when reading this book than when I'm actually in Paris" (Norton, $14).

A Hazard of New Fortunes

William Dean Howells (1890)

The critic Alfred Kazin credited Howells, onetime editor of Boston's Atlantic Monthly, with tilting the axis of literature south, to New York, when he moved there in the 1880s. His fictionalized account of the move was "about a city at a moment when it's bursting with promise," says Phillip Lopate, who wrote the introduction to this edition. Protagonist Basil March's encounters with teeming immigrant New York shift his politics, just as it turned Howells into a champion of the masses (Modern Library, $15).

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad (1902)

Not enough can be said of the influence of this imagined trip to the Congo. "Conrad established a genre in this novel," says Alexander McCall Smith, "and since then many writers have contributed to the canon of spiritually bleak, uncomfortable journeys into dark places. Unfortunately, it has established a mold for many a subsequent despairing literary vision of Africa" (Norton, $12).

A High Wind in Jamaica

Richard Hughes (1929)

Hughes's tale of warped children set upon by pirates reads like Lord of the Flies, but with irony. Nathaniel Rich relishes its depictions of Jamaica as "a country in the last throes of a losing battle with nature," while Jesse Ball loves what happens after the kids leave the island and hit the waters: "This book of books invests everything it touches with an indefinite but shimmering brilliance. Do you want to be hauled off by force along with your brothers and sisters? I do!" (NYRB, $14).

Julio Cortázar (1963)

The Argentine-Parisian novelist's very strangely structured novel—complete with contradictory instructions on how to read it—boils down to an evocative story of a man's obsession with a disappeared lover. Horacio Castellanos Moya reports that several generations of Latin American readers have gone to Paris primarily "to repeat the enchanting journey of Cortázar's fictional characters through the city. Warning: That journey ends in the cemetery of Montparnasse, where the author is buried" (Pantheon, $17).

A House for Mr. Biswas

V. S. Naipaul (1961)

Naipaul's breakthrough book, and arguably his best, is a travel novel writ large in that it tracks a whole culture in diaspora. Naipaul's Trinidad "kept reminding me of the India I grew up in," says Manil Suri. "And yet, it was different in so many ways—a tantalizing new universe waiting to be explored, to see how Indian culture had taken root and evolved on this faraway shore" (Vintage, $16).

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai (2006)

Desai's Booker Prize-winning novel of two generations straddling continents struck Phillip Lopate for its scenes of New York kitchens, "the new melting pot" of the city where struggling immigrants rub soiled shoulders. "It's really about two places," he says—New York City and an Indian backwater. "And so she keeps going back and forth between these two, and she's really writing about globalization" (Grove, $14).

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1934)

Wherever anti-hero Ferdinand Bardamu goes—World War I battlefields, French West Africa, the United States—Céline's unforgettably dark, caustic voice is there. Matthew Sharpe prefers the novel's less realistic moments: "There is, in Manhattan, a subterranean club where people go to defecate out in the open while conversing, smoking cigars, etc. Were some generous soul in real life to make the initial capital outlay for such a club, I would gladly be a founding member" (New Directions, $16).

D. H. Lawrence (1923)

Lawrence wrote this novel about a British émigré's encounter Down Under with a secret Fascist army after visiting for only a few weeks. "Lawrence is famously, furiously unfair at every turn—impatient, subjective, all over the place," says Pico Iyer. "Yet no writer had a keener nose or feel for place. Even now, when I return to Australia, the best guidebook I can find is this excessive and inflamed novel" (Cambridge, $60).

Banana Yoshimoto (1988)

Yoshimoto's interwoven family narratives make a new generation of Japanese life accessible to the rest of us. "If someone asks me if I've ever been to Japan, I have to think for a moment," says Jennifer Belle. "Thanks to Yoshimoto, I could swear I've been there. I could almost feel the tonkatsu between my chopsticks, see it sloshing into the dark brown sauce, taste it between my lips" (Black Cat, $13).

Lady Chatterley's Lover

D. H. Lawrence (1929)

Fernanda Eberstadt couldn't resist including Lawrence's novel, which, you must admit, goes places few others dare. She calls the author "the Van Gogh of travel writers, virulently moralistic, every nerve ending hallucinogenically receptive to light, landscape, vegetation, and the human characteristics forged by climate. It's not just a novel about anal sex: It's a great love poem to that most unloved of regions, the British Midlands" (Penguin, $14).

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman (1959)

The dissident Soviet novelist's take on the Battle of Stalingrad—a book considered so dangerous that authorities destroyed the typewriter ribbons along with the manuscript—is "a very complex and ambitious novel," says Horacio Castellanos Moya, "but I think that the Volga River region itself is the main character." Reading it inspired him to find the Volga on Google Earth, "the first time I did that because of a novel" (NYRB, $23).

Little Infamies

Panos Karnezis (2002)

Karnezis, who moved from Greece to England 16 years ago, manages in these stories to skewer his homeland's inhabitants with a light touch. "He depicts the intricately and hilariously knitted world of a small Greek village so well," says Marisa Silver, "that it makes me want to find such a village and spend time there, meeting the priest and the doctor, the town whore and the barber" (Picador, $14).

The Little Sister

Raymond Chandler (1949)

California was an endless fount of "metaphors and parables" for Chandler, says Pico Iyer, but he likes this underrated caper because it's here that "his chivalric impulse leads him to Hollywood, and the ultimate palace of illusions and similes, which was for him an emblem of a grasping and seductive new world" (Vintage, $13).

Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Once you get over the shock and the word games and the descriptive genius of this masterwork, you're ready for its cross-country trip into a land as dazzlingly innocent to Humbert as his young charge. "We often forget that the second half of this book is a road-trip novel," says Darin Strauss, "with the old foreign perv and the young nymphet discovering America" (Vintage, $14).

Marguerite Duras (1984)

What is it with travel and age-inappropriate relationships? Duras's novel about a French girl's seduction of a gentleman in '30s Saigon was Marisa Silver's ultimate travel fantasy: "The sensual, palpable languor of a city filled with secrets makes me want to hunt for modern Vietnam's hidden seductions" (Pantheon, $10).

Jamaica Kincaid (1990)

This spare novel about an au pair from the West Indies in an unnamed city that's unmistakably New York made Jennifer Belle see her town "as if for the first time. Through fresh eyes we see an elevator, a bridge, the winter sun." And in Lucy's memories, Barbados shimmers too. "By showing us the artificial smell of lemon-scented shampoo in America, we experience the freshness of a real lemon in her native land" (FSG, $13).

The Makioka Sisters

Junichiro Tanizaki (1948)

"It has a last line so bad that it's amazing," Nathan Englander warns about Tanizaki's chronicle of a declining noble Osaka family on the brink of both personal and national disaster. "But in terms of Osaka, it's just gorgeous. A beautiful wooden city that you know is going to be bombed [during World War II]. . . . It's this idea of reading a book set right before the end of the world" (Vintage, $16).

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil (1930-1942)

Some trips are longer than others, but Musil's never-finished 1,700-plus-page masterwork is worth the slog for its deep (yet funny) study of a shallow world. "To Musil, nothing was as absurd as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Vienna was the whipped cream heart of its absurdity," says Fernanda Eberstadt. "A zany tour of turn-of-the-century Vienna's bluestocking suburbs, its imperial hunting lodges, its working-class beer halls" (Vintage, Vol. 1: $22; Vol. 2: $26).

James Galvin (1992)

Heavily based in fact, Galvin's description of what four men did to tame an inaccessible piece of wilderness on the Wyoming-Colorado border is "an extended ode to an American West that is by now largely gone," says Jonathan Burnham Schwartz. The land is the main subject, and "Galvin knows it with an intimacy so deep it can only be imagined; he knows it like family, all its buried pains and stories" (Owl, $14).

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie (1980)

So many things are extraordinary about Rushdie's masterpiece of magical realism, in which fantasy and metaphor speak for a giant nation's post-colonial history, but Junot Díaz takes from it the lesson that the highest flights of imagination start with making places real. "Who can match Rushdie's fictional evocation of Bombay?" he asks. "In his lying is found much truth" (Random House, $15).

Martin Amis (1985)

Of all the writers to capture what was so very fast, exciting, and wrong about the eighties, Londoner Amis had one odd advantage: He was a self-styled outsider, like his ad-man narrator, John Self. Darin Strauss believes Self "understands New York in the eighties—and gets even those timeless qualities about the city's energy and indifference—in a way that only someone who's looking at it with a foreigner's peeled-eyeball curiosity could" (Penguin, $15).

André Breton (1928)

Breton's work of high surrealism, about a Parisian psychiatric patient with a serious identity crisis, has inspired many writers, including Jesse Ball. "Of books that circle Paris, that define it, that lay it on a thin spoon beside a dram of poison, there are a few," he says. "This book invests it with a great feeling of life, of chance—the whispering of curtains, footsteps, lights in the street, the calling out of voices in the night—in reply to what?" (Grove, $13).

Don DeLillo (1982)

DeLillo's first truly paranoid novel is also his first serious venture abroad—to Greece and the Middle East, where "businesspeople in transit" collude with intelligence services to make sure things go their way. Geoff Dyer calls it "a great and prophetic novel" but also "a fantastic travel essay, dense with amazed delight at the incidents and textures of this ancient and rapidly modernizing world" (Vintage, $15).

Joseph Conrad (1904)

Peter Hessler praises this book for giving "a remarkable sense of the Sulaco landscape"—its rocky peninsula and silent gulf ringed by mountains. It's an entirely made-up place, in a fictional South American country on the verge of revolution. But Hessler considers it "probably the most famous instance of how travel can inspire the creation of a place that feels more authentic than anything we see as tourists" (Penguin, $14).

The Odessa Tales

Isaac Babel (1920s)

The great Russian Jewish writer wrote fantastic war stories before he was killed by Stalin, but these tales of Jewish gangsters in Babel's birthplace make Nathan Englander feel almost certain he's been there. "I can see the overturned market or the guy in his wheelchair," he says. "The highest compliment a writer can get is when you recognize something in your memory but don't remember whether you've ever been to that place" (in Collected Stories; Penguin, $17).

The Odyssey

Homer (circa 750 B.C.)

Unsurprisingly, the book that made travel synonymous with literature when both were in their prehistory earns the most nominations from our writers. For Matthew Sharpe, it brings to mind a cascade of cultural successors: "Hansel and Gretel," E.T., and his favorite number by Steely Dan, which he quotes ("Still I remain tied to the mast . . ."). David Ebershoff simply calls it "the greatest work of travel literature. Period. Without this book, would we have any of the books on this list?" Also nominated by: Jonathan Raban, Marisa Silver (Penguin, $15).

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

Macondo, the fictional setting of García Márquez's magical-realist magnum opus spanning Colombian history, has become such a vivid location in the minds of millions of readers—"everybody's fictional place," as Francine Prose puts it—that García Márquez's hometown actually tried to add Macondo to its name two years ago. Colum McCann says, "The imagination feels awakened with every word" (Harper Perennial, $15).

On the Road

Jack Kerouac (1957)

Alexander McCall Smith calls Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness road novel "a book to read when one is about eighteen," but here's a good reason for another look: last year's release of the even more unbridled "scroll" version, drawn from the 120-foot roll of paper on which Kerouac originally wrote it out. "The physical manuscript came to stand for the journey itself—long and rolling," says Smith. "This novel goes to the very heart of American restlessness" (Penguin, $15).

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson (1987)

Napoleon's cook, not at all thrilled with his posting in bleak wintertime Russia, falls in love with a mysterious Venetian web-footed female gondolier in the British writer's surreal and dazzling second novel. Myla Goldberg says it "made me want to go to Venice more than anything, and once I got there, Winterson's fantastical version added invaluable, invisible dimensions to the experience" (Grove, $13).

John Steinbeck (1947)

Steinbeck's otherwise timeless and placeless fable, in which an impoverished Mexican pearl diver unwittingly brings ruin on his family after pulling up the largest pearl known to man, is grounded in its beautiful landscape. "Yellow, brown, orange, white—these are the colors of Baja California," says David Ebershoff. "Their purity, their earthiness, are reflected in Steinbeck's simple prose and simple, devastating tale" (Penguin, $14).

Albert Camus (1947)

The Oran of Camus's novel, whose inhabitants are tested in the worst ways by a gruesome epidemic, is an actual Algerian city but feels so archetypal that Nathan Englander originally thought it was fictional. "It's a holy place to me, it's in my pantheon," says Englander, despite the horrors Camus depicts. "To literally lock the gates of the city—that's wonderful to me as a reader, and an excellent education as a novelist" (Vintage, $13).

The Professor's House

Willa Cather (1925)

Jane Hamilton treasures Cather because she "doesn't know another writer who has that power to transport us to the natural world," in this case America's great prairies. But it's the setting of Colorado's Mesa Verde in her melancholy seventh novel, "before it was discovered, before it was a destination," that appeals most. "She makes plain the grace of solitude in a place that is at once the loneliest spot and yet so strangely peopled" (Vintage, $13).

The Quiet American

Graham Greene (1955)

Greene's prescient Vietnam novel "captures the beauty, loneliness, and moral complexity of the expat experience," says Myla Goldberg, "and presents pre-war Vietnam as a fascinating and terrifying triangle of geography, politics, and history." Pico Iyer believes the place "brought out the heartbroken poet" in Greene, who "caught much in the country that might move a traveler today. Saigon, for all its new-generation motorbikes and frenzy, in its shadows and corners remains part of the Greene zone" (Penguin, $14).

The Raj Quartet

Paul Scott (1966-1974)

One way to understand India would be to look back at how it was constructed—and deconstructed—on the eve of independence, and Paul Scott's four epic novels fix and dramatize the lost world of British India like no others. "They provoke interest in a culture that no longer exists but in a place that does," says Ann Packer (Everyman's; each two-volume set, $33).

Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick

Herman Melville (1849-1851)

In three years, Melville produced possibly the world's three greatest seagoing novels. But aside from Bartleby, his work isn't generally associated with his home port of New York. Phillip Lopate finds astonishing detail in the Manhattan-based openings of both Moby-Dick and his lesser-known novel, Redburn, which has the added bonus of "great scenes in Liverpool" (Library of America, $40).

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño (1998)

Like W. G. Sebald, Bolaño died in middle age on the verge of enormous international acclaim. But his equally mind-bending fictional journeys are shaggier and more exuberant. Here, a radical group of Mexico City literati calling themselves Visceral Realists threaten the social order before scattering across the world—to Barcelona, Perpignan, Nicaragua—and later returning to their native country. Francine Prose says that she can no longer visit Mexico City without seeing writer-revolutionaries everywhere (Picador, $15).

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles (1949)

One of the three books our authors cited most, Bowles's hallucinatory novel is "a journey into the primeval heart of Morocco, but really into the furthest reaches of the Other, the Unknown," says Manil Suri. Despite the book's being "not exactly a call to tourism," Suri was moved to travel there six months after reading it. Anthony Doerr believes that "Bowles explores, perhaps as well as Conrad or Camus, what it means to be a stranger," while Pico Iyer calls him "the greatest poet laureate of a traveler's dissolution" (HarperPerennial, $15).

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx (1993)

The writer of hard, spare modern-day Westerns (e.g., "Brokeback Mountain") may be at her best on entirely different terrain. Lara Vapnyar always marvels at "her ability to endow a place with the most complex personality," but slightly prefers her Newfoundland: "cold and gloomy, where the weather is dangerous and the best delicacy is the seal-flipper pie" (Scribner, $15).

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata (1948)

The northern reaches of Japan sometimes get as much wintertime snow as Buffalo, but there the comparisons end. In Kawabata's classic, the region's lonely beauty is the third party in a doomed love affair between a sophisticated Tokyo dilettante and a lowly backwater geisha, who stands in for Japan's neglected but enduring native culture. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $13).

A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter (1967)

Shades of Lolita (the erotic road-trip part) pass over what Salter has said is his best novel, the charged chronicle of an affair between a privileged Yale dropout and a French shopgirl, consummated in motels dotting the French countryside and observed by an admittedly unreliable voyeur. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (FSG, $13).

Cormac McCarthy (1979)

McCarthy's fourth novel is inextricably rooted in its place, namely the roughest parts of fifties Knoxville, seen by an ex-con drinking his life away. Anthony Doerr finds it "a funny, tragic, shocking, beautiful, and dirty portrait," one that "traces the collisions of industry and countryside, privilege and poverty, goatmen and policemen, humidity and snow, drinking and witchcraft—and the Tennessee River twists through all of it" (Vintage, $15).

Patrick Chamoiseau (1992)

Junot Díaz praises this "brilliant blaze of a novel" for encompassing the tangled history of Martinique (as Díaz did for the Dominican Republic in his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel). "In these pages and through these words," he says, "you can taste the shark, smell the burning fields of cane, wince under the sun, and feel the black riptide of Caribbean history, pulling, pulling. All that plus the finest evocation of Caribbean shantytown life ever put to paper" (Vintage, $16).

To the Slaughterhouse

Jean Giono (1931)

Better known for his best seller The Man Who Planted Trees, the French writer created some of the most horrific scenes of World War I ever seen in print and contrasted them with evidence of a subtler deterioration back in arid Haute Provence. Fernanda Eberstadt says, "This wildly poetic evocation of a pastoral people about to get decimated makes you love every rocky field and antiquated ram of his chosen homeland" (Peter Owen, $24).

The Tree of Man

Patrick White (1955)

A pioneer of literature from his pioneer country—and a winner of the Nobel Prize—White set the tenor of Australian literature as a constant clash between Western culture and the barren landscape beyond its shores. His saga of one family's attempt to domesticate the bush (only to later see it become suburbs) is "surely Australia's Book of Genesis," says Colin Thubron, and "has the rich sweep of a nineteenth-century Russian novel" (out-of-print).

James Joyce (1922)

How did a chaotically layered, almost impenetrable modernist masterpiece become the book that launched a thousand pub crawls? " Ulysses is an encyclopedic map of human nature, but it also maps Dublin in a perfect way," says Dubliner Colum McCann. Thus, McCann's ambivalence toward the "James Joyce tours and pubs and towels and snow globes": They're hokey but "better than the alternative of silence" (Vintage, $17).

Tony D'Souza (2006)

The most recent novelist to approach the well-trod terrain of Western aid work, D'Souza complicates his narrative by having do-gooder Jack Diaz, marooned on the Ivory Coast, sleep with a succession of natives. Peter Hessler praises D'Souza's handling of "the long-familiar relationships that shape a village, the way an outsider feels when he tries to penetrate this world, and the interplay between traditional folk beliefs and elements of modern city life" (Harcourt, $13).

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami (1995)

Murakami's vacillations between realism and fable are generally aimed at making sense of contemporary Japan, but this essential novel also encompasses the atrocities of a previous generation. Those are the parts Peter Hessler likes best—"beautifully written set pieces of the Japanese occupation of China and northern Asia. They are really the most haunting chapters of the book" (Vintage, $16).

A Woman in Jerusalem

A. B. Yehoshua (2006)

Yulia, the woman in question, has died in a terrorist bombing, and the quest to clear her name and bury her properly sends characters through traumatized Jerusalem streets and later to the forlorn former Soviet republic where she was born. "I love people who can draw Israel for me," says Nathan Englander, who lived in the same Jerusalem neighborhood during that troubled period. "This book captured a very hard time really well" (Harvest, $14).

Zeno's Conscience

Italo Svevo (1923)

Svevo's comic study of a morally compromised man's Freudian rationalizations—and urban discoveries—was rescued from obscurity by James Joyce. So, thanks to this novel, was decrepit Austro-Hungarian Trieste, which Nathaniel Rich says "feels like a living organism" in this novel: "neurotic, conniving, sophisticated, and deranged—a mirror image of Zeno himself" (Vintage, $15).

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Angela Watercutter

The Acolyte and the Long-Awaited Death of Review-Bombing

You know you’ve gone too deep into YouTube fandom when you can’t remember which dude with an expensive microphone told you what while speaking straight to camera.

Still, earlier this week, that was the particular sarlacc pit I had been sucked into. Word had spread that fans were review-bombing The Acolyte on Rotten Tomatoes and curiosity got the best of me. First, I watched this dude-with-a-mic video , which claimed that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy doesn’t like Star Wars fans and “that [Lucasfilm] started attacking the fans before the show even came out; that was to tell you that they knew they had a pile of trash.”

Another ballcapped person noted, “The main reason why this show is such a debacle is because it doesn’t feel like Star Wars … Fans like me—longtime fans like us—we’re not buying this crap. This is garbage, and we gotta call 'em out for it.” After that it was this , which explained that “the very things fans complain about are the very virtue signals the Hollywood establishment has invested so much into they simply can’t accept the audience not responding to them.” In turn, the video’s narrator concluded, the industry blames review-bombing.

It’s hard to say that any of the YouTube pundits were “wrong” or “right”—and doing so would be a surefire way to become the subject of the next analysis video . (Fast-forward to 13:51 to watch my floating head be yelled at by Carrie Fisher .) What I will suggest is this: Everyone is just fighting about fighting now.

For perspective, here’s what happened: The Acolyte hit Disney+ on June 4. The critical score on the Tomatometer sat somewhere in the 80+ percent range—not quite “Certified Fresh” but pretty solid. In the intervening weeks, the audience score plummeted and now hovers around 13 or 14 percent, which has led to reports that the show was being review-bombed, aka hit with bad-faith negative audience reviews. Since some reports connected this flood of bad scores to the show’s diverse cast and LGBTQ+ themes—er, “lesbian space witches”—there’s been debate about whether the poor reviews were coming from homophobic, racist, or misogynist corners of the fandom.

Last week, The Hollywood Reporter asked showrunner Leslye Headland ( Russian Doll ) about the response to the show. While stipulating that she didn’t think her show was “queer with a capital Q,” Headland said it was disheartening “that people would think that if something were gay, that would be bad … it makes me feel sad that a bunch of people on the internet would somehow dismantle what I consider to be the most important piece of art that I’ve ever made.”

These comments led to a bunch of reaction videos, which is how I ended up in the YouTube rabbit hole. Each video I watched had lots of nuance, but one theme kept coming up that seems to be the heart of the problem: Reviewers aren’t bigots, they just think The Acolyte is garbage and “ not Star Wars ”; Disney’s ownership of Lucasfilm is ruining the franchise, and these pissed-off fans are posting reviews to point out the show’s many flaws.

Taking this at face value, I’d just like to say: Uh, OK? Putting aside personal feelings about the show’s quality (I am a bad queer person who hasn’t watched The Acolyte yet, despite the instructions that went out in this month’s Gay Agenda newsletter; after my YouTube jaunt I’m not sure if skipping this show makes me a bad Star Wars fan or a good one), there’s another argument to be made: Sometimes franchises have bad installments—or just installments not everyone enjoys—and that’s fine.

Star Wars, like all brilliant creations, derives its genius from its malleability. George Lucas’ world-building thrives on the fact that anyone can imagine what’s happening three star systems away. Lucas himself reinforced this by turning to different writers and directors to make The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi . Disney has maybe gone too overboard with the amount of content it’s made since its $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012—even CEO Bob Iger has copped to that —but trying to say that it’s an untouchable franchise that shouldn’t be iterated upon is ridiculous.

By Matt Kamen

By Dan Gearino

By Simon Hill

By Rhett Allain

Every band makes one album their “true fans” don’t like. Every director misfires once or twice. Game of Thrones went off the rails in its last two seasons. The Walking Dead got boring. Dylan found Jesus. None of this discounts the value of the stuff fans do like. And it’s not as though everytime Disney+ drops an Acolyte or an Ahsoka , A New Hope magically disappears. Anyone stuck on Lucasfilm’s old shit can still watch it. (One of the YouTube reaction videos in this saga noted that if Lucasfilm continues “to give us Star Wars like this I will watch it burn to the ground, and we will celebrate that. The death of this franchise. Here’s the great thing: They can never touch George Lucas’ Star Wars; we always have it, and you can’t do nothing about it, Disney.” This was said without acknowledgement that Lucas occasionally touches his own work and that Disney could, theoretically, stop offering Star Wars on its streaming service.)

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to TikTok.

Ultimately, it all comes down to time. Audiences hadn’t seen anything like Star Wars (the movie) when Lucas released it in 1977. It filled a void. Nearly 50 years later, they’ve seen perhaps too many things like it. The only way for Star Wars (the franchise) to stay relevant is to let other people do new things with it. What the world may need from sci-fi in 2024 isn’t what it needed from sci-fi in the '70s. Not every installment will appeal to every fan; some of them may not appeal to any fans. One show cannot ruin a franchise, especially not when it comes on the heels of excellence like Andor and The Mandalorian .

All of which to say, review-bombing is over. Not because people should stop doing it, or because no one was really doing it to begin with. Rather, it’s finished as a concept. Expressing displeasure via audience scores may seem like a good way to get Kathleen Kennedy’s attention, but now that everything she produces becomes subject of some fan debate about its authenticity, she likely doesn’t notice. Rotten Tomatoes isn’t Yelp, and Star Wars isn’t a local business trying to keep loyal customers. It’s a global franchise with space for lots of stories. Some of them just may not be for everyone.

Loose Threads

Maybe Stefon should review The Acolyte . This Thread makes a pretty compelling case: “The hottest show in the galaxy is The Acolyte . It’s got everything. Jedi Wookiee. Lesbian space witches. Conservative tear cocktails. Unhinged fanboys. Carrie-Anne Moss.”

“Distracted Boyfriend” is a video now. Enthusiasts have used a new artificial intelligence tool called Dream Machine to turn the image labeling meme into an animated clip . Is nothing sacred?

Charli XCX released a “Girl, so confusing” remix featuring Lorde, thus ending literal days of internet speculation about a feud that may or may not have actually been a thing.

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How a disillusioned Nigerian man’s trek to Europe becomes a test of faith and ambition

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Book Review

The Road to the Salt Sea

By Samuel Kọ́láwọlé Amistad: 304 pages, $28.99 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Countless Christian songs exalt the ableness of God, but the tune that makes up my childhood soundtrack is the one my mother, a gospel guitarist, would sing when her faith hit the rockiest of shores: “If you’ve tried everything and everything failed …You know God is able … try Jesus.”

Her melodies floated back to me as I read Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel “The Road to the Salt Sea,” which follows the story of Able God, an ambitious Nigerian man disillusioned with his stagnant life. He gets drawn into a crime that sends him into the clutches of a charismatic religious leader promising impoverished Lagos residents better-paying jobs in Italy. As Able God and his fellow migrants embark on this journey, there is a foreboding sense that what lies ahead might be even more treacherous than the realities they’re leaving behind. This harrowing migration story wrestles with themes of family pressure, personal ambition, modern-day slavery, religion and that ever-prevailing Western insistence on positive manifestation — a self-help philosophy that can feel disconnected from the horrors of war and other calamities.

With a close third-person narrator, the book opens like a thriller — with Able God hiding and nursing a wound — before the narrative quickly flashes back to the events leading up to this fateful moment. At 32, the college-educated Able God is not living the life his mother had imagined for him when she bestowed him with such an aspirational name. He’s stuck in a dead-end job at a luxury hotel in Lagos, where the glass walls, gleaming chandeliers and vast lobby stand in stark contrast to his one-room apartment devoid of electricity.

A deeply religious woman who weaves her Yoruba traditions and Christian faith, Able God’s mother rebukes him: “Do you want to serve others for the rest of your life?”

While he has long strayed from his religious upbringing, Able God is just as idealistic as his mother; he’s simply bound to another form of faith: self-help books whose affirmational phrases he repeats like proverbs.

Determined to “think” his way into manifesting the life he fantasizes about (world-renowned chess player or wealthy business magnate), every day he flashes his “hundred-watt toothpaste-commercial” smile at hotel guests, affluent people he believes could help catapult him into a better future. But Able God also resents the way some of the travelers treat hotel workers and other working-class Lagos residents. “How had he acquired his wealth?” Able God wonders about a guest named Dr. Badero. “He was sure he’d built his wealth on the blood, sweat and toil of the powerless.”

Able God and his co-workers witness all manner of outlandish behavior from privileged guests, but when Dr. Badero turns violent against a sex worker who lives in Able God’s neighborhood, Able God cannot turn a blind eye. “He had known men like Dr. Badero all his life, men who dominated women — and who hurt them. Men who thought sexual conquest was a God-given right.” Such an assessment could be lifted from these fictional pages and plopped into recent news recounting the actions of powerful men.

Obsessed with saving the woman he believes is in danger, Able God becomes embroiled in a crime from which no affirmations or prayer can rescue him. A religious leader hawking the migration to Italy promises the trip is “free” and can be paid later with their jobs. This snake-oil salesman’s name is Ben Ten (after the namesake TV series’ cartoon character with the capacity to morph into different aliens).

As he endures an increasingly difficult trip, Able God leans on self-help mantras the more he senses his control over his destiny slipping away. “Enjoy the journey on the way to your destination,” he recalls. Yet not only is this journey not enjoyable — it threatens the lives of the migrants as they cross border checkpoints stocked with corrupt soldiers, trudge through the unforgiving Sahara, face starvation and thirst and enter a part of Libya still reeling from civil war. “We are close to the Promised Land,” Ben Ten tells them after weeks of traveling, but following his announcement comes a dramatic turning point that plummets the migrants into human trafficking, slavery and even graver violence.

In his essay collection, “How to Write About Africa,” the late Kenyan author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina wrote satirically about journalists and authors who treat one of the world’s most diverse continents as though it were a monolith. “Treat Africa as if it were one country,” he advised, tongue-in-cheek. “It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. … Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions.”

In “The Road to the Salt Sea,” you’ll find starvation, power dynamics inherent in class systems, the aftereffects of war, but the novel is proof that when a writer dares to broach such themes, stereotypes can be dismantled through specificity, through painting characters as full beings. With his attention to detail and rich crafting of an interior life for Able God, Kọ́láwọlé offers us a masterclass in sensory writing (engaging the five senses in ways that repulse and delight). He subtly weaves history into his narrative and balances his main character’s inner life with the chaos of the external world. “These children lacked guardians and lived in poverty, but they also had freedom.”

In an interview with the Hopkins Review, Kọ́láwọlé, who was born and raised in Ibadan, about 80 miles north of Lagos, says his greatest wish is for his writing “to touch the heart of my reader.” In “The Road to the Salt Sea,” he grabs us by the throat, gut and heart. At times, the suspense is all-engrossing; at other times, one wrenching scene after another overwhelms. Yet the novel reminds us that even in calamitous times, the search for meaning and purpose continues, despite the ways in which mantras might fall short, biblical messages might confound and false prophets and preachers peddle desperate and vulnerable people.

During a stop in Niger, Able God wanders upon a place of worship “reduced to ashes” in what he believes was the result of religious riots. “Could God inhabit something so charred and dilapidated?” he wonders. Able God is no saint, but his fight for physical survival, and even his ability to hold on to a shard of optimism in the face of atrocities, is testament to the tenacity of the human spirit.

Cassandra Lane is author of a memoir, “We Are Bridges,” editor-in-chief of L.A. Parent and a contributor to the anthology “Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California.”

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In ‘Horror Movie,’ horror master Paul Tremblay plays with perception and reality

Remaking a lost low-budget movie from the ’90s, filmmakers confront true evil.

Contemporary horror films tend to follow a familiar script: Good people are pursued by evil ones, and the audience is secure in the knowledge that virtue will prevail by the closing credits. Author Paul Tremblay likes it murkier; he’s a novelist who embraces moral ambiguity, good intentions led astray by a troubled conscience. In his latest book “ Horror Movie ,” a clutch of aspiring filmmakers making a low-budget thriller grapple with nothing less than the nature of evil itself, the kind that patiently lies in wait inside all of us.

In 1993, four young adults in suburban Massachusetts pool their meager resources to make a thriller called “Horror Movie.” Using the classroom of an abandoned high school as their primary location, they shoot what appears to be a low-grade exercise in torture porn. The film is never completed and is forgotten, until three tantalizing clips are posted online 25 years later, and suddenly the project is elevated to “lost classic” status, a movie that becomes “as famous for not being made as Jodorowsky’s Dune.” We soon learn three of the film’s four principles have subsequently died, which only adds morbid mystique to the movie’s myth, and stokes Hollywood’s desire to make a reboot that finishes what the old film started.

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Tremblay’s slippery unreliable narrator (we never learn his real name) is the only surviving member of the film’s cast, a middle-aged struggling writer who played a mute and masked character called the “Thin Kid” in the film. When the unearthed clips of the film attract Hollywood’s attention, he is summoned by the present-day filmmakers to participate in the remake. While the erstwhile non-star is being strung along by insincere Hollywood creative types with artistic pretensions (characters that Tremblay nails with pitch-perfect dialogue), the thin kid-slash-paunchy man spools out his version of what happened in that classroom. Tremblay’s book darts back and forth in time, so that the reader can contrast our narrator’s present-day stories with Tremblay’s set pieces, formatted as screenplay excerpts, that show us what actually transpired a quarter century earlier. It’s clear that something has been lost in translation, that the Thin Kid’s present-day stories are a whitewash. He is clearly hiding something, but what?

Tremblay knows that real terror — the kind that keeps us up at night — is unknowable, and so he keeps the weirdness of his novel at a steady low boil. The movie plot slowly reveals itself like a plume of blood rising up from the depths of a repressed memory. During the filming, there are specific directives that must be observed, taken not from the script but from a classroom chalkboard marked with mysterious instructions.

We never see the chalkboard, nor do we know what is written there; we do know that the action being shot is somehow pre-ordained, that the rules of this bizarre game must be followed. The Thin Kid can never take off his mask, he must never speak, or read the script ahead of time. A cryptic symbol is painted in the center of the classroom, and the Thin Kid must sit there until instructed otherwise. He squeezes himself into a supply closet and stays there overnight. He is pelted with trash and debris. At the center of everything is a haunted mask that the Thin Kid is required to wear at all times, a mask that the original film’s writer Cleo claims to have found, but which is clearly vested with some very bad mojo.

It’s best to think of Tremblay’s twisty novel as a gothic tale about repressed angst and anxiety: suburban ennui shading into a kind of death trip. Tremblay’s “screenplay” slowly reveals the scar tissue of kids reared by clueless adults sleepwalking through their guardian duties like domestic somnambulists. Stuck in a dead zone of the spirit, the filmmakers use their movie to act out their worst impulses by proxy, to cleanse themselves of some inchoate mortal rot that has been eating at them. The Thin Kid is their sacrificial lamb, the misfit outsider who is transformed, like Dr. Caligari’s Cesare, into a physical manifestation of what Edgar Allen Poe called the “dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

As it turns out, there is much more at stake than a potential film distribution deal: The film is much stranger than fiction and the truth, when it comes, hits us like a body blow.

Tremblay is a master of misdirection; just when the reader thinks he has landed on solid ground, a trapdoor opens into some unspeakable surreality, and the chasm between film fiction and real life opens and swallows us whole. This nesting doll of a novel, a book that Judy Blume and Philip K. Dick might have jointly conceived, tests the limits of what a horror thriller can be, and it succeeds thrillingly.

HORROR MOVIE

By Paul Tremblay

Morrow, 277 pages, $30

Marc Weingarten is the author of “ Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water and The Real Chinatown .”

Using the GuideAlong App: Audio Tours for Awesome Road Trips

Have you ever wished that you had a tour guide in the backseat of your car for road trips through national parks or along scenic byways?

The beauty of GuideAlong App ( formerly known as GyPSy Guide ) is that these location-based audio tours perfectly direct you to all of the best things to see and do along your way so you don’t miss a thing. Plus they are:

• Easy to use
• Allow you to travel and explore at your own pace
• Quick to download for offline use

Table of Contents

What are GuideAlong Audio Tours?

As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This page may contain affiliate links. I would love your support through clicking on the links. Read the full disclosure here.

The GuideAlong driving tours are the best audio guided tours that you can download that provide narrated guides for your road trips and scenic drives.

The GuideAlong Audio Tours provide a guided commentary that uses free satellite GPS signal along with the GPS on your cell phone.

It IS just like bringing you own tour guide along for the ride!

Even Yellowstone National Park recommends the GuideAlong narrated driving tours as one of their main tips for seeing the park with the best audio guides tours app.

How Does the App Work?

Begin by downloading the app and then selecting the audio tour for the destination of your choice.

Click the link below and then scroll to the bottom of the page to download the best audio tour app from the Apple Store or on Google Play .

Using free GPS signals provided by satellites around the world as well as your phone’s GPS chip, the GuideAlong app determines your location.

As you drive along, the GPS signal uses your location and when you pass a pre-determined point, the commentary from the app plays pre-recorded content automatically.

You don’t have to do anything to queue the commentary.

Your GuideAlong narrator may suggest side trips to take, crack a corny joke, give a history lesson of the area, share insights on significant historical figures from years gone by, or present behind-the-scenes stories to enhance your visit.

Often locals know of little known tips and locations to visit . GuideAlong shares them with you too. You can travel at your own pace, choose to skip a side route, spend a little longer at a scenic overlook, or return to a highlight on the route that sparked your interest.

The path and the timeline are up to you. You can start anywhere on the tour or start from the official tour start location. It is up to you.

Each of the audio guides that you purchase from the GuideAlong app are yours to keep. Forever.

There are no time limits to its use and no monthly subscriptions to maintain. As tours are updated, you will receive FREE updates.

Our GuideAlong Reviews

Sometimes all we need is a suggestion from others to inspire us to try something new. These GuideAlong reviews from simplyjolayne.com articles show our enthusiastic support of these app tours.

In his research, my husband, Chris found an app called  GuideAlong . It was an excellent guided tour throughout the park. Using the wonders of GPS and satellites, the commentary played automatically as we passed a GPS point, sharing behind-the-scene stories, tips, side trips, and driving directions. The guide was excellent. Vibrant Fall Foliage in North Carolina

Chris and I highly recommend the  GuideAlong app for Yosemite National Park  or other national parks you may be visiting this summer. The guides are available for a number of destinations, and provide lots of information, history, significant contributions of different people, and random interesting information. National Park Adventures in Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia

Audio Guides: Locations

Currently, the GuideAlong app offers audio tours throughout the United States, in Canada, and Australia. You can purchase each tour separately or check out the p re-packaged bundles in a variety of locations to save money .

The GuideAlong Bundled Locations

1. guidealong utah “mighty 5” national parks.

Includes Arches National Park , Bryce Canyon National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, and Zion National Park.

Buy the Utah Mighty 5 Bundle

2. GuideAlong Glacier National Park and US Northern Parks Tours

Includes the Black Hills, Badlands, and Mount Rushmore of South Dakota, Glacier National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Grand Teton National Park.

Buy the US Northern Parks Bundle

3. GuideAlong Yosemite, Grand Circle and California

Includes Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, GuideAlong Big Sur Pacific Coast Highway 1 , Capitol Reef, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas (Grand Canyon West, Hoover Dam, and Red Rock Canyon), Sedona, Yosemite National Park , and Zion & Bryce Canyon National Parks.

Buy the Grand Circle and California Bundle

4. GuideAlong Canadian Rockies and Vancouver

Includes Banff National Park, Lake Louise, Yoho, the Icefields Parkway, Jasper, Vancouver, Whistler and locations along the Canadian Rockies .

Buy the GuideAlong App Canadian Rockies Bundle

Buy the GuideAlong App Canadian Rockies and Vancouver Bundle

5. GuideAlong Rocky Mountain National Park and All United States West Tours

Includes Arches and Canyonlands, Big Sur, Capitol Reef, Badlands, Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas (Grand Canyon West, Hoover Dam, and Red Rock Canyon), Sedona, Yosemite National Park, and Zion & Bryce Canyon National Parks, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

Buy the All US West Bundle

6. GuideAlong Road to Hana Tour and Four Hawaiian Islands

The GuideAlong Road to Hana Tour and Four Hawaiian Islands includes Oahu, Maui, Kauai and Big Island, Hawaii (the complete collection of the Hawaiian Islands).

Buy the Road to Hana Tour and Hawaii Bundle

All of these locations can also be purchased as individual tours as well.

Buy the GuideAlong Road to Hana Tour

Additional Options

For example, if you are headed to Montana and plan to visit Glacier National Park, download the audio tour from the GuideAlong App for Glacier National Park . Upgrade your vacation experience to a whole new level.

If your travels take you to the East Coast, take the GuideAlong along with you to Great Smoky Mountain National Park , Vermont , and Key West in Florida .

The Australia tour includes the scenic drive along the Great Ocean Road .

There are many more GuideAlong driving tours not listed above. Check out the website to see if there are audio guide that fits your travel destinations this year .

Pair the GuideAlong app with an American the Beautiful National Parks Pass . The Pass will require a separate purchase but allows you entry to ALL National Parks within the United States.

Check out the Discovery Pass (also a separate purchase) when visiting national parks within Canada.

How Do I Access the GuideAlong App?

The App is free to download from the Apple Store or on Google Play (scroll to the bottom of the page). You would then buy individual tours or bundles as IN-APP purchases.

Need a refresher on how to download an app ?

Follow these simple instructions:

• Open the Apple or Google Play App Store to GET apps for your device.
• Search for the GuideAlong app.
• Touch the “GET” button to download the app to your device (Note, there will be In-App Purchases).
• Click the button to Install the app on your device. If you see “OPEN” the app, you have already downloaded the app and simply need to open it on your device.
• Search or browse for content or destinations on the GuideAlong App that you wish to purchase.

What Happens if the Area You Visit Does Not Have a Great Cell Signal?

Download the GuideAlong App and the tour you have selected while you DO have wifi or good cell service.

Because the app uses the magic of GPS to automatically play the audio tours, you do not need to have cell service to use the app once you have downloaded your tour .

The GPS signal comes from satellites and is free.

Reminder * Download the App and your selected tour BEFORE you set off on your adventures.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is guidealong worth it.

Yes! Sarahbera 2 offers one of many reviews: “Wow! Significantly improved our trip to Maui! We are so impressed with the GuideAlong app, we bought the Maui packed and used it for road to Hana among other routes. The commentary is useful and spot on! We would drive by past something and say “I wonder what this is?” And then our audio guide would answer that exact question. It was so informative and perfectly paced. Can’t wait to use it in other areas of the world!”

Is GuideAlong free?

The GuideAlong app is free to download. Once downloaded, there are In-app Purchases for each of the audio tours or bundled tours you wish to enjoy.

Who is the GuideAlong narrator?

Dave Pettitt , a Canadian actor who has also done voice overs for television series and video games, is the GuideAlong narrator.

Do your GuideAlong purchases expire?

Once you make a purchase, that specific tour is yours for good. You can do the whole tour again, pick up where you left off, or start from the opposite end for MORE sensational views and information.

Are there any GuideAlong app discounts?

There is a FREE tour “ From Calgary to Banff ” that introduces you to the Canadian Rockies. Your best discounts would come from purchasing “Bundled” Tours.

When is the best time to download GuideAlong?

The BEST time to download the app and your selected tours is when you have access to WiFi or have good cell service. I recommend doing this BEFORE you set off on your adventures.

Is the GuideAlong app the BEST audio tour app?

In my humble opinion, yes. Check out the GuideAlong reviews if you want to read what other people are saying.

What does GPS mean?

GPS stands for Global Position System. It was developed by the U.S. Military and is free for anyone to use.

I have always wanted to see giant sequoia trees. Is there a GuideAlong Sequoia tour?

You can see the giant sequoia trees in the Grand Circle and CA bundle as well as in the Mariposa Groves of the Yosemite GuideAlong audio travel guide.

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Final Thoughts on Using the GuideAlong App for the Best Driving Tours in 2023

GuideAlong audio tours are amazing. You will love the stories, the quaint side trips, and intriguing historical information from the GuideAlong narrator . He has a voice that is interesting to listen to and his crazy “dad” jokes will have you laughing or shaking your head!

Your kids will love it too.

Headed to a national park this summer? Download the app today and bring GuideAlong on all of your road trips this summer. Consider giving the tours as gifts to family and friends as they set off on travel excursions of their own!

You may also enjoy these posts…

• Super Picturesque Stops in Big Sur, CA with GuideAlong Audio Tours
• 12 Awesome Off-Season Destinations for Fall
• 41 Coolest Gift Ideas for Travelers (That They Actually Want!)
• Vibrant Fall Foliage in North Carolina
• National Park Adventures in Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia

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I’m a Colorado-based travel blogger with a passion for exploring the world, enjoying family time, and taking fantastic photographs. I am also a book writing, creative thinking, detail loving, frequent flying, comfort loving mom of three girls and wife to an amazing guy. Discover More .

51 Comments

I had no idea this was even a thing! How cool! I am so excited to check this out.

We have enjoyed using the app. Hope you find it helpful as you travel.

This isn’t available in my country just now, but what a good idea. Love the idea of getting a bit of insider knowledge!

They seem to be expanding, slowly but surely. Hopefully it will make it to the United Kingdom and beyond soon.

This is a great find! I’d love to have it while still enjoying my alone time! Thank you for sharing.

It is pretty great. Let me know what you think if you decide to try it.

This app sounds SO cool. I’m definitely going to look into it. Thank you so much for sharing this!

You’re welcome.

Great explanation of the app! It sounds perfect for our full time RVing!

Thanks so much for sharing!! Always looking for new apps for trip planning, especially for the National Parks.

I had never heard of the GyPSy app before. But I do like the idea of getting an audio tour as I take a drive. And awesome to get tips from locals and tidbits of history. I will have to check this out on our next road trip.

I hope you love it.

I have never heard of this app. I wish they did destinations on the East Coast. I would buy it to get narrated tours of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah Park.

They have added more tours in the past year and I am sure they will continue to add more. Keep checking back.

This is so cool! I had no idea GyPSy Guide existed, and I really wish I’d known for my Utah Mighty 5 road trip. What a missed opportunity! I’ll know better now for my next road trip – thank you. Xx Sara

I haven’t heard of the GyPYsy guide before, but it’s definitely an app that I’d find useful. Thanks for recommending it!

Let me know what you think.

I’d never heard of GyPSy Guides before but it sounds so helpful! Especially great that you can download it so that it works where there’s poor reception, I’ll have to give it a try!

As most people here saying I had no idea about this app. I will give it a try when in Australia:) Thanks for sharing!

I’d love to try out the Australia tour as well!

what a fun app! I love audio guides!!!

I can’t wait to check out the GyPSy app on my next US road trip!

This sounds so awesome! We are heading to a few parks over spring break, so I’ll be sure to download this!

Wow, I didn’t know about this app out there, so helpful! thank you for putting it together

I hope you get a chance to try it. Let me know what you think of the audio tours if you do.

We really enjoyed listening to the tours last summer and hope to listen to a few more in our travels this summer.

How fun! This will be so helpful in national parks.

I never thought this was even possible! Love it! Thanks for sharing!

What a great travel app! New to me, I will definitely be sharing this with my kids on our next road trip. Thanks for sharing it – we love hearing local stories and legends.

This sounds awesome! Thanks for sharing about this resource!

GyPSy Guides are terrific! I purchased the Yosemite and the Candian Rockies tours and so happy that I did. The auto tour added so much to our experience.

We used the GyPSY app for the first time in Maui for Haleakala NP and the Road to Hana. We really enjoyed it, I cant wait to use it again at other parks!

This is such a good idea! Definitely the sort of tool I’d use as I’m not a guided tour kinda gal.

How did I not know this was a thing? This is definitely something that I will check out before our next vacation. Thank you for such an informative post on something I didn’t know existed!

Wow this is such an awesome app, I did not know this existed!

You learn something new every day! I will look into this app!

I love that there is an element of humanness to this guide. And of course, Gypsy Guides sounds great for those who prefer to listen rather than read. I had heard about this, so will look up the Hawaii one now 🙂

GyPSy Guide seems to be the best! We are planning an Australia trip soon and I will download this app. The tip to download earlier if there is no phone signal is great! Thank you for this great blog post. 🙂

What a great concept. I have never heard of it but will keep a lookout for the Australian ones. Thanks for sharing.

Wow! This is such an amazing application. Love the idea behind it. Self-guided tours are the best.

I’ve never heard of this before. But, since we are traveling to more and more places like this, I’m sure it will come in handy. Thanks for sharing!

I’ve never heard of this app, but it sounds really useful! I might look at trying it out. Thanks for sharing 🙂

I definitely need to check out this app. I love audio guides and I love that you can download it ahead of time!

Oh I’ve never heard of this app before but what a fantastic idea, thank you for introducing it to me!

This sounds like a great idea for an app in the modern day! I hadn’t heard about it before but I’ll definitely be checking it out now.

This sounds like a perfect app. We’ve used a similar app before on a tulip route in Flevoland, the Netherlands and thought it so convenient.

I’ve never heard of anything like this, but it’s such an incredible idea! That’s for sharing such a thorough review

This is such a helpful tool! I’ve gone on so many road trips and never new about GuideAlong. Thanks for sharing this.

What great useful information! I will bookmark this and remember to use on my travels

I pinned this for later as the hubs and I are discussing a road trip this fall. Very cool!

This peaked my interest so much that I had a look at their other guides and found that they have an Australian guide for the Great Ocean Road, so I may use that at some point. Thanks for the info!

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