A few years ago, as I was planning a yearlong sabbatical in Europe, it occurred to me to wonder: Just what exactly do people do when they're traveling? Sure, there's sightseeing, museums, walking tours. But what else? How do they spend all the hours?
Once my trip started, I quickly realized what they do: They think. They muse, they ponder, they let their minds wander through tangled back alleys of thought like a tourist lost amid the cobbled streets of a medieval city center. But there can't be many people whose travel-feuled meditations are as enjoyable to share as Alice Steinbach's. Her memoir, WITHOUT RESERVATIONS, is a gracefully meandering chronicle of her travels in Europe and her search for a new definition of herself.
Steinbach, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and single mother, realized one day when she was "a certain age" that she'd allowed herself to be defined exclusively in relation to others: She was a mother; a friend; a writer who made her name by focusing on the lives of other people. Once her children were grown, she writes, "I felt my identity was narrowing down to one thing --- being a reporter. What had happened, I wondered, to the woman who loved art and jazz and the feeling that an adventure always lurked just ahead, around some corner? Had I just been too busy writing about other people's lives to pay attention to her?"
To find the answer, she made a difficult but exciting decision: She would take most of a year off from the job she loved and spend the time traveling. She'd start with her lifelong dream of renting a hotel room on Paris' Left Bank, then continue through England, Scotland, and Italy. She would seek adventure and independence and, more importantly, she would try to find the girl she had once b