Review of "1000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die"

For a bit of a laugh, since I was getting bored of not thinking about traveling, I picked up Patricia Schultz's "1000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die" to see what all the hype was about.

I read the whole of the introduction, and it was cute since it is true that you don't really notice the beauty of what's around you. The disclaimers about the content of the entries was helpful too, and easy to follow.

Then came the places to see....

Arranged by areas of the states, that was the only interesting thing about it. Sure, there were some places that I hadn't heard of before, but most of the cities and festivals are just your standard hyped-up places. While I don't mind that, because if something is popular, it's usually worth visiting, but the introduction led me to believe that it would be more about cute, out-of-the-way towns than the 10 areas of New York City, or calling a festival "a place". Some of the more major cities in the USA had 2-10 entries in the book...why not give me one entry about how much the city has to offer and then give me another unique city to visit?

And the inclusion of Canada was laughable. It makes up about, oh 1/16th of all the entries? And those entries are mostly about Vancouver, with a few entries for Quebec and Ontario and then one or two entries each for the rest of the provinces and territories. And the places listed, aside from the territories, are all reachable on just jumping across the border as you skirt along the upper USA, not much in the northern areas of the provinces except where you drive through BC to get to Alaska.

The entries were what the guidelines promised though, the hotel, restaurant or museum where the writer stopped, with a couple other pieces of information, but the "where" part was odd because it was like the author was measuring distances from the nearest airport and assuming you want to rent a car and drive from that airport. What if you're doing a road trip of the USA, or coming from a different direction? Not very helpful then.

All in all, cute for armchair travelers and people who don't know where they want to go, but it takes some of the fun out of just exploring the roads on your own and is misnamed "1000 places".

2 out of 4 stars.