I’ve never been a very good traveler, mainly because I tended to be carsick after going about twenty miles in the back seat of the family car. (I concluded later, once I was in college and riding with more considerate drivers, that it was my father’s cigarette smoke in the confined space that was responsible for my nausea.) A good friend from high school lived in the same dorm as I did and we usually arranged to catch a ride with the same fellow student; the guy who, years earlier, had been the neighborhood bully forbidding me to ride my tricycle on the sidewalk in front of his house. By age eighteen, I seldom felt queasy while riding in cars, but busses were definitely iffy and, if I couldn’t get the usual ride home for holiday vacations or semester breaks, I stayed in Iowa City or took the train to Newton, and my dad picked me up for the brief journey home.

Once graduated and married, I found that being the person behind the wheel offered enough diversion from the problem that I had no time to think about my touchy stomach. Old habits die hard, though, and I still tend to resist attempts to lure me into long automobile journeys. Busses are out – the last time I was on a bus remains an embarrassing memory. For the most part, I’ve done my “traveling” through my own imagination and books and movies that, while they were pretty selective, showed me some of the more spectacular sights of the world.

In recent years, travel shows on Public Television have become more frequent, about a greater variety of destinations, and more relevant than earlier ones. And I have often enjoyed the happy coincidence of happening on a tour of some faraway place that I’ve been reading about in a novel or actual world news event. The most recent, an adventure novel that took place in several different world cities. When the novel took the action to Amsterdam, Rick Steves took me there on television. Many of the sights described in print were shown to me on film, much history of the area was presented and reality and imagination combined to present a view of Amsterdam and the Netherlands that was more thorough than any experience an actual traveler might encounter on a typical organized tour.

Some of my favorite writers take me to real places, and some are decorated with imaginary details. There is some confusion in my mind as to which details are authentic and which are products of the authors’ imaginations. For instance, Janet Evanovich takes me to Trenton, New Jersey, which is a real place, but are the restaurants, neighborhoods and other locations in her stories actual places, or invented for the sake of the story? Does it matter? I’ll never get to Trenton to find out, anyway, so I can just enjoy being in those imaginary places right along with the real ones. That’s a bonus, as far as I can judge.

Agatha Christie takes me to an England that doesn’t exist anymore, but she makes it possible for me to become a time-traveler and share the luxuries of upper- class English society as it once was and the adventure of travel by sea and rail that are no longer available. Dick Francis takes me to the royal box at horse races in England, then to the Australian outback, all within a few turnings of the page. Steven King and Dean Koontz have transported me to adventures in other worlds, places that we can find on no maps or in no geography books and shown us things that only the readers of their books know about. They even inspired me to write the following poem:

WORLD TRAVELER

One April day, a drop of rain ran, shining, down my window pane / it trickled through some grassy pools and followed Nature’s ancient rules; / went never up but always down, wound lazily through field and town / and joined with other streams until they raced along to brightly spill / into a large and docile lake and came eventually to make / their way into a river wide that married with the ocean tide. / There, guiding currents led the way until, another April day, / my raindrop and some billions more, curled in a wave on Bali’s shore.