A while back I went off on 5 things that are getting off my nerves . One of them being the proliferation of travel lists, specifically the books that tell you that you must go here and do these specific things, otherwise, you haven’t really lived. This whole idea that travel has to be a series of checklists and if you just go wander, discovering interesting little towns filled with interesting people, somehow that’s not enough. You should be racing to the next “must do”!
Other writers and bloggers have ridiculed these books and the whole sub-genre, but nobody has gone off as extensively and deliciously as Mark Morford did in this San Francisco Chronicle piece: 1,001 Ways to Read a Column . He notes that we now even have a book called 50 Places to Golf Before You Die and wonders, “…by the way, if you’ve played golf in more than, say, 20 of these places, aren’t you already sort of dead? I mean, just a little?”
Go read the whole thing for a good chuckle, but I’ll leave you with this paragraph:
Maybe what bothers me is how Carpe Diem Syndrome is just half of the game. Or a tenth. Hundredth. Because, the truth is, you could eat at every restaurant in the world and see every exotic wonderland and view a million great works of art and still be quite the miserable, spiritually vacant, neoconservative jackass with a world-class photo album and the soul of a cockroach.
