Publisher’s Preface: The Best Travel Writing 2006
The virtues of travel have long been touted, and we are all familiar with the clichés. Travel broadens the mind, dissolves dogma, rattles the cage, brings new vigor to the step. It is hilarious, romantic, life-threatening, enlightening, toxic to weak relationships, invigorating to the strong. Travel is tedious and soporific, exhilarating and addictive. It is expensive because evanescent, cheap because the traveler is forever rewarded with memory and story. You wish you were home, you wish you never had to go home. All of these things are true, and if you are lucky you may well experience each of them on the same trip.
Added on February 21, 2006