road trip – couldreads

It’s happening!!!

Today is a momentous day! After months of planning—actually about three weeks of planning, then six months of forgetting—I have officially begun scheduling my Great American Bookstore Tour for the spring of 2013 (which gives me plenty of time to save money and scout out FedEx locations so I can ship all the books I buy back to New York.)

For the unfamiliar, the Great American Bookstore Tour (GABST) is my plan to visit some of the biggest and most legendary bookstores America has to offer, before they all go belly-up because of the stupid Kindle. Of course, it works to my advantage that all of these stores are in cities I have yet to visit (with the exception of NYC and Washington DC), so my otherwise culturally motivated endeavor will also be an excuse to conduct a mini cross-country tour of the U.S. and eat all manner of roadside foods. Yay fried cheese!

Here is the itinerary:

1. NYC –> Seattle. Visit the Elliot Bay Book Co. as well as that needle that goes into space.

2. Seattle –> Portland. Visit Powell’s Books, take discreet photos of hipsters, eat locally grown food and generally get in touch with my bohemian side.

3. Portland –> San Francisco. Visit City Lights, the Mrs. Doubtfire house, the Full House house, ride on a trolley, check out that bridge, complain about steep hills.

4. San Francisco –> Denver. Visit The Tattered Cover, look at mountains.

5. Denver –> Washington DC. Visit Politics and Prose, regale my high school friends with my adventures.

6. Washington DC –> NYC. Visit The Strand (for the millionth time), unpack, feed my incredibly lonely and neglected cat.*

*I will not actually leave my cat alone for two weeks.

Step 1—a flight from NYC to Seattle—has just been booked, which makes this whole idea just that much more real. Now I only have a rental car, multiple hotels, another flight, $5 million in gas money and $6 million in book-buying money left to save up. Totes possible. Totes.

The Great Bookstore Tour

I’ve been thinking lately of vacations, as one tends to do when theirs has recently passed (and they have nothing left but the remote promise that next summer will bring another week of freedom and peace, of detachment from current events and an endless supply of curly fries.)

Friends have criticized me in the past for being, let’s just say, unimaginative when it comes to travel. It’s not that I don’t think the world has plenty to offer—I want to ride a camel past the pyramids as much as the next girl—it’s just that I’m a naturally anxious person; extensive travel makes me want to break out in hives. (I wouldn’t actually break out, but I’d want to, so the world might see a physical manifestation of my inner turmoil when it comes to adventure.) My plan has always been to remain a relatively vanilla vacationer until the day I stumble across an incredibly wealthy and far more adventurous soul mate, who will whisk me away to destinations unknown, which I won’t mind because while we’ll split the paying, he’ll handle the planning.

Until that day comes (at my current rate of male courtship, we’re looking at 2030 or later), I’ve decided that I should at least try to break out of my comfort zone, which isn’t hard since said zone’s exact geography is within a five-mile radius of Ocean City, New Jersey, where I go every year to reap all the benefits of vacation (sun, sand, complete lack obligation) with none of the downsides (i.e. I know where everything is, I can walk everywhere, and there’s fudge.) Further, in a fit of inspiration last week, I think I’ve settled upon my next non-adventure: a cross-country tour of the best bookstores in the U.S.