Following the Sun is the story of John Hanson Mitchell’s journey from Spain to Scotland. On a bicycle. He begins in Spain on the vernal equinox and ends in Callanish on the summer solstice. Along the way, he encounters many interesting characters and stories – and a lot of flat tires.

Mitchell tells the story of his bicycle journey in a laidback fashion. Even when he’s battling against wind and rain, it doesn’t seem to faze him much. His descriptions of some of his meals made my mouth water. And who wouldn’t want to travel around to little villages all over Europe, staying in bed & breakfasts (a.k.a., a very nice person’s spare bedroom), and sampling local delicacies at the town café (or pub)?

This was also an educational book. Mitchell is a lover of the sun and sun lore. He intersperses stories from his journey with stories from world cultures. He covers everything from mythology to the development of the heliocentric view of our solar system. Most of this was interesting. Some of it I could have lived without (there’s a lot of sacrificing to the sun god in world history). And as a Christian, I didn’t really appreciate him lumping Biblical events in with world myths and trying to explain how these stories evolved over the past five million years.

A minor pet peeve – his writing style really bugged me at the beginning. He is a great user of run-on sentences. For example: “They wore wide-brimmed straw hats held in place with white bandannas tied beneath their chins, and they all had round, nut-brown faces, with rosy cheeks and white teeth, and many of them wore full-cut blue or brown skirts and heavy shoes.” Seriously? Why isn’t that three separate sentences? After awhile, though, he either stopped writing like this or I stopped noticing, because eventually it no longer annoyed me.

As an armchair traveller, I like being able to learn as I read. But in my opinion, this book could have used more travel narrative and less history lesson, especially since his worldview didn’t agree with mine. I picked it up because the idea of riding a bicycle from Spain to Scotland intrigued me. That’s the story I was hoping to read. It was in there, but there was a lot of other stuff that got in the way.

I am a travel writing junkie. It’s usually the section I head for first in a bookstore, eager to discover another person’s take on France or Italy or Australia. I love to travel vicariously (although I must admit, I do a fair amount of traveling myself – it’s not all armchair-centered).

Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day by Doug Mack sounded right up my alley. Inspired by a trip his mother took in her 20s, Mack travels through Europe using only Arthur Frommer’s 1963 edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day as his guidebook. He does his best to stay only in Frommer-mentioned hotels and eat only at Frommer-mentioned restaurants. Hunting down these places is dubbed “Frommering” by his travel companion, Lee. Unsurprisingly, many of them are closed or completely changed. A fair amount of Mack’s book is spent reflecting on what it means to be a tourist and how tourism itself changes the places that tourists come to see. I learned a lot about the history of travel and how Frommer’s guidebook blazed a trail for the middle class tourist. Europe was no longer just for the rich and famous.

Mack visits eleven cities in two different trips – Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Vienna, Venice, Rome, and Madrid. He’s shy and hasn’t traveled much alone, so much of the book is spent on eye-opening experiences as a foreigner in a strange land. And honestly, this was the part I found the most tiring. Round about Zurich, his friend Lee goes home and Doug is left to finish his trip alone. And he is lonely. And whiny. So lonely and whiny, in fact, that it spoils a portion of his trip (and my enjoyment of the last section of the book). He claims to be “over” Venice in six hours and forty-three minutes, and challenges anyone to stay interested in the city longer than that. Well, Mr. Doug Mack, I have spent six days in Venice and would gladly go back. Every traveler has been lonely at some point in their trip, even if they are traveling with friends or family. It’s hard being in a different country without all of the familiar things around us. But don’t let that seep into your travel writing. Surely some editor down the line should have said, “Cut the whining and tell me what you saw!”

His optimism recovers by the last chapter in Madrid. The book ends positively, and hopefully inspires at least someone to travel to Europe (though a more recent guidebook is recommended). Mack’s adventures are amusing and enjoyable, for the most part. And if – when – he travels again, I hope he leaves the whining at home and learns to live in the moment. After all, that’s what travel is really about.