DK Eyewitness Travel Guides
The first time I bought a DK travel guide was our trip to Amsterdam a few years ago. I looked at several books and I bought only two, DK’s Amsterdam and Holland books, and I felt quite fortunate for my selection. Unlike many of the guides I’ve seen, the DK travel guides are very pictorial. They have breakout images of key sights so that you know exactly where to look. This works for me because I’m visually oriented.
What I loved so much about the Amsterdam and Holland books was the canal walk. A long glossy page folds out from the book and it depicts detailed images of the buildings along the canal with tidbits about the history and architecture of each building. The houses along the canal are very narrow. They were built with a tilt to them and with a winch mechanism on the roof as a way to haul furniture and large things up the floors, something I wouldn’t have noticed without the book in my hands. The canal walk is perhaps my most favorite memory of Amsterdam.
I found the city and the country books overlapped too much to make it worth buying both, but I’m also paranoid I might miss something so I keep buying both anyway. I’ve bought the books for Ireland and Scotland. The Ireland books were quite helpful for the Rosslyn Chapel. For our trip to Rome tomorrow I bought the Rome book and the Florence & Tuscany book. I skipped the Italy book. I did, however, purchase Frommer’s Rome and also Fodor’s Rome. I was a little compulsive at the time. I did read a review saying the Rome book was disappointing, but I won’t be able to tell until we get there.
I also think I’m a little more uncomfortable about traveling to Rome. The only places I’ve been so far are the Netherlands (Amsterdam, basically) , Ireland, Scotland and England, where everyone speaks English. Yeah, the brogue can be hard to follow sometimes, but still it’s English. So I’m out of my comfort zone and concerned about getting lost or missing out on things. I like to think I’m not ethnocentric, but I’m so American it’s not funny. This trip seems more complicated than the others.
So I’m loaded up with books and maps, all bound to get heavy, that I will lug around like a security blanket to compensate for the fact that I’m too American to speak a foreign language. I’m determined to have fun, however, and go with the flow. How can we go wrong? There’s so much to do and see that any little bit of it will be enriching and we can always go back for seconds.
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