Why a Booktrail?
1980s: Calvin Trillin’s accounts of his trips to Europe with his wife, Alice, and their two daughters
Travels with Alice
What you need to know before your trail
Calvin Marshall Trillin is an American journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist and novelist. Here he decides to take his wife and children on a grand tour around the world and this is the result. Attention: this book will make you hungry as well as give you a sense of wanderlust.
Travel Guide
Travel around Europe with Calvin Trillin and family
IF you want to find out how Americans travel – how they used to travel in the 1980s, then this is the funny account of how they did just that.
Calvin Trillin then take his wife and their daughters around the world to experience all the food and culture they can.There’s a very funny hunt for the best hamburger in Paris and finding where to play “baby foot” in Italy. Baby foot is apparently like the game Chandler and Joey played in the TV show Friends.
In Taormina, Sicily, they cheerfully disagree with Mrs. Tweedie’s 1904 assertion that the beautiful town “is being spoilt,” and skip the Grand Tour in favor of swimming holes, table soccer, and taureaux piscine.
In Paris, they spend a day on the Champs-Elysées comparing Freetime’s “le Hitburger” to McDonald’s Big Mac.
In Spain, Trillin wonders whether he will run out of Spanish “the way someone might run out of flour or eggs.” Filled with Trillin’s characteristic humor, Travels with Alice is the perfect book for summer travelers.
“”I realize that in the matter of parents’ responsibilty to pass on some appreciation for the culture of the Western world there is an argument for raising a child in a home where Santa Croce has never even once been referred to as ‘the big church near the babyfoot bar.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Travels with Alice
Destination: Europe Author/guide: Calvin Trillin Departure: 1980s
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