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“ . . . how much easier it is to let the mind, rather than the body, do the traveling. No tickets or schedules, no borders, no passports. Thought is the one thing that remains free no matter what changes outside the head.”
—Not Now Voyager (2009), Lynne Sharon Schwartz, (contemporary writer) 

What a relief, reading and laughing my way through this anti-travel book—after years of being the most stay-at-home one of my friends—hating the routine of arranging tickets, rearranging accommodations, and all the rest of it. Probably I started my travels under-funded, and too late (over 30) for mishaps to feel like adventures. Somewhat insomniac in my own bed at home, I’d go through a whole trip with bleary eyes, a rumbling stomach, and a sense of being assaulted, rather than stimulated, by most new sights and impressions, (not to mention depressed by the conditions I saw in places highly recommended as “colorful” by friends.) 

Schwartz—who, I admit, had done quite a bit of traveling before she wrote this anti-travel book—legitimizes my staying put now, living out the old saying by that famous, richly-traveled stay-at-home, Emily Dickinson: “There is no frigate like a book.” 

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