Was early for a coffee date, so stopped in my favorite travel bookstore in Seattle. Really wanted some fiction or travel memoir from Ecuador, but didn't find anything. Decided this looked appropriately inspiring. We shall see. She's had several other travel memoirs published, so hopefully that is a good sign.

this was a pretty darn mediocre book. I LOVE LOVE LOVE travel memoirs, etc...read a ton of them. But this....this was a SLOG...I even started skimming a little bit by the end. I didn't enjoy the narrator's "voice." Never really felt like i read anything interesting. perhaps it is just that her style of vacationing doesn't interest me. i mean, I'm definitely jealous of her ability to spend months traveling. But reading about each bed and breakfast just got dull. And I thought this was going to be more adventure and/or horseback riding. But really, she just took lots of airplane rides (and a few buses) to different towns. When in a town, sometimes she could find a tourist ranch that offered riding lessons, so she'd go on these guided day tours while staying at her bed and breakfast. I'd gotten the impression that she was actually going to use horses as a MODE OF TRANSPORTATION and ride around Argentina.

I will say that the author obviously did a lot of research and some of the historical stuff was interesting. But yeah, i just didn't care. The "funny" stories weren't very funny. the "hardships" really didn't seem that hard (oh, you're bottom is sore from riding all day and so there's a big bottle of aspirin at your hotel, or when she arrived in a new town and called the horse riding tours place they didn't have any horses available).

So yeah. Maybe someone planning a trip, or someone looking for less adventure in their travel readings will enjoy this, but I thought it was pretty lame. i just finished it out a weird sense of obligation to the cute bookseller who sold it to me (he didn't personally recommend it, or anything).