I hated its execution. Hated its arrogance. Hated, most of all, its squandered potential.

I didn’t want to hate this book.

When I saw last year that Rick Steves was publishing On the Hippie Trail, Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, I was excited. At last, the most successful guidebook author-turned-TV-host of his generation—and, by all accounts, one of the most upright souls in the travel industry—was going to give readers a glimpse under the hood of his empire’s origin story. And as a budding travel writer, I was eager to learn about how he established his name and how he figured out how to sell books based on facts that are outdated the moment you ink them to paper. At the very least, I surmised, the book would give readers insights into the world of decades ago, peppered with insights from one who makes his living chronicling that world.

Silly me.

Some level-setting. On the Hippie Trail chronicles an overland trip that Rick and his friend (and frequent collaborator) Gene Openshaw took from Istanbul to Kathmandu in the summer of 1978. Rick not only visited, but kept a 60,000-word diary of Iran before the ayatollahs, Afghanistan without a whiff of Soviets or Taliban, Pakistan before it went nuclear, and India before it became the world’s economic engine. Such a chronicle had more potential for gold than Smaug’s hoard in Erebor. We got Nathan MacKinnon vs. the open net.

In 2008, Paul Theroux published Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, wherein he re-traced his own trip from the Seventies, chronicling both the changes in the world and in the author. By contrast, On the Hippie Trail barely acknowledges that these countries are unrecognizable from the ones Rick visited. It has zero insight into hints that Rick might have glimpsed at the time, but which only make sense in retrospect. Instead, I learned what an American boomer ate for breakfast in 1978. About long bus rides (ohmigod, it’s bumpy!) through Iran. About cheap hotels (wow, there are cockroaches!). About border hiccups that prove little more than inconveniences.

On the Hippie Trail fails on “the making of a travel writer” as well. All we learn--in one sentence at the end--is that Rick decided to stop giving piano lessons and start a travel business. That’s it. We learn none of how this business grew, or how Rick balances writing with the drudgeries of making payroll. We don’t learn why Rick decided to focus his work on Europe, on beaten-track cities and high-end hotels, which don’t feature in this book at all. All we are left to assume is that “I took a trip. I enjoyed it so much I decided to make my livelihood out of something kind of related.” Features on Rick in The Washington Post and the New York Times offer far richer insight into this part of his life. I wish the man himself had been more candid.

If there’s one redeeming quality about On the Hippie Trail, the photography is golden. The snaps, rendered on film, capture that bygone world in ways that the text falls short. (Perhaps it would have been better as a coffee table book to spare us the reading). Rick could have made a living as a travel photographer.

On the Hippie Trail doesn’t dent my respect for Rick. He is still an upstanding guy and has built a travel empire that many of us can only envy or doff our caps to. But all I know, dear reader, is that when I eventually turn my 2005-06 New Zealand diary into a bestseller, I will base it around how the world and I have changed in the decades since. On the Hippie Trail taught me the pitfalls of thinking the world would care because I’m famous.

In sum, this book wasn’t worth what I paid for it. I got it from the library.

The site consists of several components. At its center stands a stone cube, 5 meters by 5 meters (about 16 feet by 16 feet), built from remnants of buildings in the Judengasse, the old Jewish Ghetto. A steel band outlines part of the footprint of the Börneplatz Synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938). A plaque on the wall describes this destruction in German and English.

Along Rechneigrabenstrasse, on the southern edge, stand five street signs commemorating the names by which the area was known: Judenmarkt (16th Century–1885); Börneplatz (1885–1935); Dominkanerplatz (1935–1978); Börneplatz again (1978–1987) and Neuer Börneplatz (since 1996).

At the northern rim of the memorial stands a wall that surrounds the site of the old Jewish cemetery along Battonnstrasse. On this wall are mounted 11,908 steel blocks, each bearing a name and (if known) dates of birth and death of Frankfurt Jews murdered during the Shoah. Among them are the diarist Anne Frank, her sister Margot, and her mother, Edith Holländer Frank.

Next door, the Museum Judengasse — which is built over remnants of the original Judengasse — explores the experiences of Frankfurt’s Jewish community, from its origins in the Middle Ages through the present day. Permanent exhibitions detail Jewish art, culture, and the destruction of the community by the Nazis.

In December 1048, Bishop Bruno von Egisheim-Dagsburg received his papal nomination in Worms and traveled to Rome to become Pope Leo IX. He became a major player in the Great Schism of 1054, which divided the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

In 1122, the Concordat of Worms was signed by Pope Callixtus II and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, establishing that bishops would receive their spiritual authority from the church while remaining loyal to local monarchs.

The Diet of Worms of 1521 — where Emperor Charles V called on Martin Luther to recant his teachings — took place in the Bishops’ Court Palace, which stood next to the cathedral until its destruction in 1689. When Luther refused to recant, Charles declared him a heretic and forbade his writings.

The cathedral, which measures 110 meters by 27 meters (about 360 feet by 90 feet) was mostly finished in 1181, though additional parts have been added or renovated since. It was damaged in the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution, and has undergone several restorations. The cathedral was set on fire, though not destroyed, by the Allied bombing raids that leveled much of Worms on February 21 and March 18, 1945.

Visitors can step into “Luther’s Big Shoes,” a bronze monument in the Cathedral courtyard, which was placed by the local Rotary Club in 2017. A more substantial Luther Memorial — featuring the man, fellow reformers, and personified cities that accepted the Reformation — stands one block to the northeast.

Inside, the Baroque high altar was designed by the renowned 18th-century architect Balthasar Neumann. Medieval stone carvings of famous Biblical scenes line the walls along the nave. In the cathedral crypt, visitors will find the resting places of five generations of Salian dukes.

The rivers’ personalities are apparent from both the ground and from the surrounding hills. The inky Ilz, “the black pearl of the Bavarian Forest,” slinks slowly through the peat and spruce forests of the Bavarian Forest. The blue (sometimes brown) Danube, which begins six hundred kilometers west in Donaueschingen in the Black Forest, ambles without haste. The grayish-green Inn, which rises in the Swiss Alps, rushes with urgency through Austria and Bavaria before plowing into the Danube from the south. From above, particularly in summer when snowmelt is highest, the Inn appears to swallow both rivers whole. After the Dreiflüsseeck, the Danube’s color more resembles the Inn than it had before Passau.

The Dreiflüsseeck is also an excellent tourist attraction in its own right. Kids can play on the playground or follow the 1:1 billion-scale “Planetenweg” -- a 1:1 billion scale solar system model which begins at the Ortsspitze and stretches 4.8 kilometers down the Inn. History buffs can also look to the south across the Inn toward see Mariahilf Abbey (where Mozart once worshipped or where Austrian Kaiser Leopold absconded to pray for victory over the Turks in 1683) or the north to Veste Oberhaus, once the stronghold of Passau’s ruling prince bishops. At the tip of the Ortsspitze’s tongue lies an anchor, a monument to the victims of the Danube, which was placed in 1971. At the back of the park stand remnants of Passau’s medieval city wall, which began construction in 1250. The visible portion is from the sixteenth century.

As seen on Atlas Obscura.

Along the grand avenue of Unter den Linden in Berlin stands a stout neoclassical memorial. Set a few meters back from the street, and catty-cornered from the State Opera and the expanse of Bebelplatz (the site of Berlin’s May 1933 book burning), the memorial can be easy to miss. Yet, a visit not only resonates but also enables visitors to trace the evolution of Germany’s culture of remembrance, or Erinnerungskultur. The monument is called the Neue Wache. New Watch House.

The Wache was built between 1816 and 1818 by Prussian Surveyor General Karl Friedrich Schinkel to house the king’s soldiers while commemorating Prussian heroes from the Napoleonic Wars. The Doric columns and frieze centered on Nike, the goddess of victory, while statues of Prussian military heroes Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow stood sentinel outside.

In 1931, the Wache was repurposed by architect Heinrich Tessenow—a mentor of Hitler’s eventual city planner, Albert Speer—who gutted the interior, opened an oculus to the sky, and placed a black granite block with a German oak wreath to honor German soldiers from the Great War. During Nazi rule, a cross was added to the wall, symbolizing the regime’s exclusion of Jewish servicemen.

After the monument and a third of Berlin were destroyed during World War II, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany—which governed the German Democratic Republic—restored the memorial in the 1960s and later rededicated it to the victims of fascism and militarism. A glass prism housing an eternal flame was placed at its center, while an unknown soldier and nameless concentration camp victim were buried inside the monument, surrounded by soil from Second World War battlefields and concentration camps.

In 1993, three years after Germany reunified, President Richard von Weizsäcker re-christened the Neue Wache as a National Memorial to Victims of War and Dictatorship. For its centerpiece, Chancellor Helmut Kohl selected a scaled-up version of “Pietà” by German artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose son Peter fell in World War I. The grieving mother symbolizes the personal pain and suffering of wartime loss, while a simple inscription, “Den Opfern von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft”, or “To the victims of war and tyranny”, invites visitors to grieve their own. The simplicity reminds visitors of grief’s depth.

As seen on Atlas Obscura.

As I was preparing to review the majestic yet earthy prose and the wet from sweeping seascapes in The Salt Path—Raynor Winn’s runaway 2018 bestseller that became the 2024 film—report after report after report insisted that Wynn exaggerated the premise. She did not, her detractors claim, lose her farm in Wales due to some bad investments (financial fraud generates a lot less empathy). And her husband’s terminal, rapidly advancing cancer diagnosis that the walk supposedly forestalled turned out to be neither terminal nor rapidly advancing (he’s still alive). Ms. Wynn disputes the charges. But as a reader, sometimes it’s better to maintain your illusions.

Which is unfortunate, since The Salt Path still would have had enough juice without the perseverance angle. Indeed, Ms. Wynn’s decision—however it arose—to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path along the southwest peninsula of Great Britain, was a bold enough premise. Along the way, Ms. Wynn treats her readers to eloquent yet grounded descriptions of the windswept coast, of walking through brambles and over rocks, of wild camping everywhere from golf courses to beaches. Despite little actual plot—spoiler: they keep walking—she possesses a remarkable gift of keeping her reader in an otherwise normal British landscape. I was less interested in whether Ms. Wynn would finish, but in the lessons she would pile up along the way.

Indeed, Ms. Wynn’s asides on the walk’s “circumstances” and lessons are some of her most poignant notes. “Our hair was fried and falling out, our nails broken, clothes worn to a thread, but we were alive. Not just breathing through the thirty thousand or so days between life and death, but knowing each minute as it passed, swirling around in an exploration of time,” she writes. The lesson may be trite—“Live in the moment” is about the most ancient conclusion one can land on—but the prose makes it worth reading. The same holds for the moment when Ms. Wynn watches a ferry to Spain pass out of sight, as she reflects on observing one’s past life fade into the horizon. The new, (maybe) earned spins on old wisdom give The Salt Path its salience.

As author and therapist Lori Gottlieb puts it, “there’s no hierarchy of grief.” And if Ms. Wynn did fabricate her circumstances, it’s tragic, since she didn’t need the supposed trauma to confront these conclusions. Anyone in their mid-forties can attest that death doesn’t have to be imminent to be ever-present, that one needn’t stand on the precipice of loss to reflect on the harshness of its inevitability. Even those who haven’t lost everything can view relics of a past life and mourn their irretrievability. Perhaps Ms. Wynn should have trusted herself a bit more. Or perhaps she should have realized that she didn’t need grief to take her readers on the trail. In one of the most famous hiking memoirs, Bill Bryson set out on the Appalachian Trail because he felt like it.

Regardless of its backstory, I appreciated The Salt Path’s reflections and its lyric descriptions of the British coast. As a piece of travel literature, it more than holds up. Had I not stumbled upon the news about the controversy, I would have led with “This book made me feel soaked.” For a coastal hike, at least that remains beyond dispute.

Her initial chapters didn’t leave me optimistic. Her prologue is almost beat for beat the same predicament--an equipment malfunction miles from anywhere--that opens Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. But whereas Wild slows down and unfurls the trauma and loss that drove Strayed onto the Pacific Crest Trail, The Wilder Way speeds through Ms. zu Beck’s early days, light on details and long on anecdotes. We learn that Ms. zu Beck’s marriage failed in part due to her infidelity, but only after the fact and through her husband’s non-reaction. We learn about her descent into alcohol, drugs, and thoughts of suicide, but gain little insight into Ms. zu Beck grappling with her despair. Whether this is due to Ms. zu Beck’s guilt, a rush to her meal ticket (the travels), or whether the details of that era are tied up in NDAs, we don’t know. But since Ms. zu Beck has already documented much of her road life on tape, I had hoped The Wilder Way would offer more about the anguish that drove her there. By the time Ms. zu Beck scrapes together enough for her one-way ticket to Nepal, some 40 pages in, I felt like I barely knew the character.

On the road, though, Ms. zu Beck shines. Her descriptions of waystations ranging from homes in Pakistan to trekking the Himalayas in Nepal to whiling out the early pandemic on Socotra Island in Yemen bring out vibrant, theatrical details reminiscent of her vlogs. (A 300-strong YouTube library must help with research.) And while some of her metaphors are cringeworthy--”they launched their questions at me like long-range missiles” -- it’s impossible not to appreciate Ms. zu Beck’s aptitude for translating visuals to text. The entire time, I could hear Ms. zu Beck’s dulcet British tone, pulsing with wonderment as it led me along. The Wilder Way would make an entertaining audiobook.

Yet most touching about The Wilder Way is how it evolves from a trauma-and-guilt memoir to one of finding a journey home--not home in the physical sense (though that happens), but in peace with herself. Ms. zu Beck confronts burnout more honestly than most memoirs I’ve read. While her travels beget epiphanies that, in lesser hands, could seem too perfect, Ms. zu Beck avoids the trap of making them seem forced. Plus, if someone spends all her time on the road, where else would she learn?

The thin beginning aside, my biggest critique of The Wilder Way lies with Ms. zu Beck’s editors. Those cringey metaphors notwithstanding, a bit more cleanup could have helped. To wit, consecutive paragraphs use the phrase “call mountains home.” And several scenes seem to come out of nowhere: Ms. zu Beck details her joy over leaving the Catholic Church, yet no antecedent indicates she had a problem with it. Lastly, a book that strives to bridge cultures should know that it’s the Afghan-- not Afghani-- border.

In interviews promoting The Wilder Way, Ms. zu Beck has speculated about dialing back her online life in favor of writing. She should. Now that she has settled into semi-nomadic life in the Carpathians, it would be interesting to see how her lifestyle evolves, or even if it remains sustainable, as approaches middle age. Regardless, though, she should hold to the truth that both The Wilder Way and the Odyssey recognize: regardless of our travels, we’re all trying to find our way home

.

Less than two years after her delightful Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, Alice Loxton whirls her readers on foot through medieval England, weaving tales of love, violence, devotion, and more historical anecdotes than three hundred pages should hold. In Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, Ms. Loxton traces the cortege of Eleanor of Castle, whose death on November 28, 1290 was followed by a thirteen-day procession through the English countryside to Westminster Abbey. Ms. Loxton, inspired by her own “medieval pilgrimage” waiting in The Queue to see Queen Elizabeth II lying in state in 2022, set out to re-trace the same journey, with the same stops, on the same dates--in December, mind you--of her medieval forebears. Let no one claim Ms. Loxton isn’t dedicated to her craft.

“Lost Queen,” though, is a misnomer. While Eleanor of Castile is overshadowed by her eponymous predecessor from Aquitaine, Ms. Loxton’s journey proves that Eleanor of Castile is anything but forgotten. For one, her cortege was commemorated by twelve obelisks--Eleanor Crosses, they’re called--built by her husband, Edward I, in the four years after her death. Each marks a place, ranging from major cathedrals to obscure villages, where Eleanor’s body rested on its route to London. While only three survive today (the rest were casualties of the Reformation and the English Civil War), Ms. Loxton discovers that each location still commemorates Eleanor in its own way, whether through murals, plaques, statues, or re-created crosses. Even the Charing Cross Tube station in London greets commuters with an Eleanor wall, before they exit to see a full, Victorian Era cross on the street. When Ms. Loxton finds the “Queen Eleanor Interchange,” a roundabout on the A45 in Northampton delightful, it’s hard not to nod along with her. This Eleanor is anything but lost.

In her myriad interviews, Ms. Loxton insists that she sets out to write books that she would want to read, and that she models herself on, among others, Bill Bryson. With due respect, such a comparison sells her short. Bryson is a renowned curmudgeon, and his travel tales regularly go out of their way to bring a place or its denizens himself down a peg. Ms. Loxton, by contrast, brims with stubborn optimism and embraces her journey with fascination and joy. (In Eleanor, that is particularly necessary, since her first three days each demanded more than twenty miles of walking.) Throughout her walks, she constantly imagines her subjects walking, or even in dialogue with, her. And therein lies Ms. Loxton gift as a historian: she lingers little on the dryness of dates or the umpteen thousand battles, and instead emphasizes the emotions that must have been in overdrive during a thirteen-day funeral: love and grief. “Did the royal children weep to see their mother’s body lying in front of the high altar, finally in her place of rest? What of King Edward, that tall, lonely figure? Did he hold back tears to see his beloved Eleanor’s body, surrounded by flickering candles?” she asks. That Ms. Loxton ruminates so openly on such unknowable questions helps connect the reader with subjects that lesser authors render distant.

Like all medieval monarchs, Eleanor and Edward married as a political alliance (he was fifteen, she thirteen). But unlike many, they did come to love each other during their thirty-six-year marriage. And the most enduring expression of that love, the Crosses, inspired memorials that have become some of Britain’s most prominent landmarks. As Ms. Loxton points out, during the Victorian Era, the “build-your-own-Eleanor-Cross” trend gained traction in Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Glastonbury, and most prominently of all, in London, where Queen Victoria commissioned architect George Gilbert Scott to honor her beloved Albert in 1872. So perhaps Edward was on to something when he wrote “those whom in life we dearly cherished and in death we cannot cease to love.”

This is also Ms. Loxton’s dedication for Eleanor. And it’s apropos for a book that is hard not to love

.