The pleasures of summer include hopping in the car and hitting the highway, sometimes on the way to someplace special, other times just to feel warm wind on your skin and oneness with the sunshine. The Road Trip Book: 1001 Drives of A Lifetime (Universe. $36.95. www.rizzoli.com), edited by Darryl Sleath, is a fount of inspiration for navigation.
Organized by continent, the book offers three different categories of trip within each section: Scenic drives feature stunning views that won’t stop you from humming along to the radio; Adventure routes offer more challenging roads, with tight curves and dramatic shifts in elevation; Culture trips follow paths previously blazed in history, literature and film. Recommended itineraries range from just a couple miles to several hundred, so you can tap this book for daytrips as well as vacations.
Sleath has paid particular attention to utility: there’s an index to drives that’s organized by distance covered and, most valuably, a URL with each entry which point to detailed online maps. Just be sure to scan the relevant pages of the book before you actually hit the road. At 960 pages, This traveler’s treasure trove weighs about as much as a VW Beetle.
