Hitting the Trail With Lewis and Clark--in Paperback

Why does the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06 continue to excite Americans? Probably because it’s so hard to imagine the sort of bona fide adventure the explorers endured in the 2 1/2 years it took them to go 8,000 miles from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River and back again.

In the winter of 1804-05, the season when the party’s Shoshone interpreter, Sacajawea, gave birth to her first son, there was little food and an abundance of frostbite.

Travelers today who follow the party’s footsteps through that stretch of North Dakota will be hard pressed to find hardship. What they will find is a statue of Sacajawea, replicas of Native American earth mound houses, and the fort that the expedition built to survive the winter. And a Holiday Inn and a Best Western.

This book helps bridge the conceptual gap, maybe nudge someone sacked out in a climate-controlled room to stroll a section of the trail and imagine the sensation of snow wisping under aromatic buffalo hide blankets.

The author presents a comprehensive list of expedition-specific sights, among them the new, 25,000-square-foot Lewis and Clark National Trail Interpretive Center just outside Great Falls, Mont. But Fanselow is most helpful when she’s intercutting her concise but evocative history lessons with travel tips, such as where to look for buffalo burgers.

You’re probably thinking that this paperback is a hastily published attempt to capitalize on the recent success of Stephen E. Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” and Ken Burns’ subsequent PBS series, right?

Wrong. In a cover blurb, Ambrose says he listed the original hardcover version of this book in the bibliography of his own. Fanselow, he says, “did such a fine job of surveying the trail that my copy is worn out and needs to be replaced.”

THE FUN ALSO RISES, The Most Fun Places to Be at the Right Time by Alan Davis (Greenline Publications, $17.95, paper).

Who’d have thought having fun was such work? A degree in higher mathematics is required to interpret this book’s intricate charts, with their myriad symbols and abbreviations for every imaginable aspect of fun finding.

Just try to figure out the author’s obviously odd personality by interpreting his eclectic ranking of North America’s 50 best fun destinations.

The Sundance Film Festival is probably a blast if you’re a lift-line schmoozing agent type. But would that kind of party dog also dig talking “catalytic converters and design over champagne and hors d’oeuvres” at . . . the Detroit Auto Show?

Is one who gets rapturous over waltzing at the Triple Crown black-tie ball before Baltimore’s Preakness horse race likely to salivate over the Memphis in May World Championship Barbeque Cooking Contest?

And what fun-ness criteria does rural Nevada’s infamous Burning Man performance art blowout share with the Galveston, Texas, Christmastime Charles Dickens festival?

Although there would appear to be little rhyme or reason for Davis’ rankings, his compilation is packed with useful information about 50 events in the U.S. and Canada, each of which is likely to meet someone’s idiosyncratic notion of a good time.

Quick trips

BAY AREA BACKROADS by Doug McConnell, with Jerry Emory (Chronicle Books, $16.95, paper).

McConnell is a San Francisco TV travel dude. Most of his insights into that distant region’s hidden pleasures are good ones--who knew that the East Brother Lighthouse Station, set on a tiny island in the bay, is now an inn open for romantic getaways?

And Stacy Geiken’s color photographs are grabbers.

But Southern Californians are encouraged to boycott this book until the author apologizes for outrageous regional imperialism and removes the final item. San Luis Obispo is not “the southernmost city in Northern California”; it is the northernmost suburb of Southern California.

THE RICHES OF FRANCE--A Shopping and Touring Guide to the French Provinces by Maribeth Clemente (St. Martin’s Griffin, $19.95, paper).

Limoges china, Baccarat crystal and table linens from Alsace. Antiques from ancient chateaux. Chocolates. Wines. Clemente reveals a passion for shopping and expertise in how that avocation is best pursued in what she describes as a consumer heaven of a nation.

Books to Go appears on the second and fourth Sunday of the month.