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Hotels are nice, banquets are nice and the pretty sights are all nice, but I wanted more information on cost-efficient lodgings and fun, adventurous, & foreign Farmer's Market brunches, and most importantly, more tour sites. The author should also have put into consideration the fact that most people who ARE considering a grand, World-scaled Tour, or even a brief vacation somewhere exotic, either can NOT afford such excessive luxuries on a daily basis, or they will not be WILLING to; I'm sure many people consider abroad tours just for the heck of it, i.e. backpacking--like myself. Yes, I get it, you've stayed in all the five-star, treats-you-like-a-Royalty, $400-per-night Grand Hotel suites all throughout the World, and you liked their banquet dinners with their fancy hors d'oveurs while enoying the view of their pretty, "sprawling gardens". What meager sites that were mentioned, were told of by other numerous tour books thousand times over and more.Other than these grievances, it was a moderate tour book with portable size and portable, brief info.At least you could have printed the pictures COLORED. The compact size of the book was favorable, but I didn't know that would mean it also had compact, 20-second guides per city. You also should have mentioned your 24k-golden toilets and those diamond-embedded pillows you rested your head upon after a tiresome day of the luxurious tours.Come on, I was looking for a general Tour Guide, not an All-Around-The-World Hotel Yellowpage. When it actually started to get interesting, it went onto other popular, well-known cities, and then finally onto her excellent selection of hotels and cabins and the like.
I can see having a pint in a Dublin pub as a thing to do, and she has recommendations for that. One of the entries for Dublin is to go to a fancy french restaurant. But for fancy french food, I think I would go to France. I have to reinforce what others have said. This books tends to stress 5 star hotels and fancy restaurants.
Perhaps it could come in handy for wealthy travelers whose idea of seeing a foreign country is to stay at a fancy Americanized hotel and only venture outside long enough to take a limo ride to the local Starbucks and/or McDonalds outlets. Can you imagine the thrilling vacation pictures I could take of the mint on the pillow or the new tile in a hotel hallway. Ooo.sooo exciting.I think this book was designed to make money, not be useful. Expensive hotels and spas.and more hotels. I'll be returning this book. I certainly find it hard to believe that with all the amazing things to see in the world, the author thinks the lobbys of non-historic hotels and other expensive (but otherwise boring) retail businesses should be on anyone's Top 1000 list. Did high end hotels pay to be included in this book. I guess the author would suggest I skip the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids in Egypt (or in the Americas) and, instead, sit in some expensive hotel room in the middle of nowhere.
With 1000 entries that still leaves enough natural wonders and "real" experiences to keep most people busy for a lifetime of travel. Of course, I may be biased because she included my town in her list of "must sees." Some call Roswell the world's number one crackpot travel destination, but Ms Schultz has rightly recognized The UFO Capital of the World, in all its tacky splendor, as one of the 1000 places to see before you die. What a wonderful way to discover travel possibilities. For the most part I greatly enjoyed her selections, as well as her lively writing style. -Lynn Michelsohn, author of Roswell, Your Travel Guide to the UFO Capital of the World. Patricia Schultz has gifted us with the opportunity to find unique experiences throughout the world. She does seem to cite an awful lot of high priced hotels as travel destination in themselves, and very few (not surprisingly) are in the third world, but if you don't like some of her selections, just skip them.
This is a companion piece to another volume of hers, in which she explores 1,000 places to see within the United States.The world is divided into eight regions, for the purposes of organizing discussion: Europe; Africa; the Middle East; Asia; Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands; the United States and Canada; Latin America; the Caribbean, Bahamas, and Bermuda.In a brief review here, it would be impossible to illustrate each region in any depth. The spirit of this book is well exemplified by a quotation from Mark Twain (Page xv): "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. Sail away from the safe harbor. Again, lots of fun.
But there are other treasures as well: Bellagio, Rhodes, Ile de Re, Kinsale, and Ludlow.Africa: The Great Pyramids, Abu Simbel, Jack's Camp in the Kalahari Desert, the Cape Winelands, and so on.United States and Canada: Kenai Peninsula, Monterey Peninsula, Telluride, South Beach, Art Institute of Chicago (one of my favorite art museums), Art Gallery of Ontario, Nimmo Bay Resort, Polar Bear Safari, and the like.This is fun simply to browse. Choose a page at random and fantasize a trip there. But that's part of the fun of a book like this.Europe: Some of the usual suspects like Windsor Castle, Winchester Cathedral, London, the Salzburg Festival, Vienna, Paris, Versailles, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Sistine Chapel. Why were others included.
Explore. Needless to say, any selection like this is apt to engender discussion--Why were some places left out. So throw off the bowlines. Maybe some samples from a few of the regions.
Discover." So, the author advances a listing of places throughout the world worth discovering. Catch the tide winds in your sails. Dream.
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