Steinbach is a curious, friendly traveler. I want to see the Carré Rive Gauche celebrate Five Extraordinary Days. I want to buy a ridiculously expensive French dress. I want to follow in her footsteps and take the time to just stand in the light in the chapel of Sainte-Chappelle. The city came alive for me as she described it. That reputation Parisians have” attitude for a while.
I’ve had a sort of “I’d like to go to Paris but, you know. She is curious and she is friendly and she is a traveler, not a tourist. My copy is littered with post-it flags marking books she mentions that I have to read or artists whose work I want to look up. She is intelligent, educated, and interested.
I genuinely liked the Alice Steinbach I found in these pages. She went to Paris, London, Oxford, Milan, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Asolo. She had only the vaguest of itineraries and very few travel reservations. So she planned an open-ended months-long trip to Europe.
She was happy, but she felt that she needed some time to get acquainted with herself now that her two sons were grown. Illustrations not seen by PW.Journalist Alice Steinbach decided that she was going to take a break from the life she was living. To have adventures to see if I could still hack it on my own, away from the security of work, friends and an established identity."" Supplying more finely observed details might have made this a richer book, but the writing is generally optimistic, warm and genuine in a Chicken-Soup-for-Travelers kind of way. Though the descriptions of each locale are thin, they are not really the purpose of this memoir rather, the author's intent is to connect emotionally with each city and to learn ""to take chances. The obstacles Steinbach faces on her journeys seem minor-overcoming a fear of ballroom dancing in Oxford and putting aside the habit of always doing ""at least two things at once."" Only in Milan, when she was nearly mugged, does Steinbach experience anything harrowing. From there she heads off to Oxford, where she takes a course in English village life, and on to Milan, where she meets the most charming of her fellow travelers, a young American girl soon to be married. Her not-quite-spontaneous adventure begins in Paris, where she finds a kindred spirit in a worldly Japanese businessman. For Steinbach, traveling is an exercise in reconnecting with a more independent and uninhibited side of her personality. In a travel-book-cum-memoir set against a glamorous background of European cities, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steinbach describes the months she spent traveling after she took a sabbatical from her job as columnist for the Baltimore Sun.
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