Tripwolf Blog

Many travelers undertake religious pilgrimages – dusty hajis to Mecca and reverent strolls through the Vatican. I enjoy literary pilgrimages myself. I’ve paid respects to Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex,” Margaret Landon’s Siam, and Jonathan Swift’s Trinity College Dublin. Nothing whets my appetite for exploration like exotic literature; the original travel writing. Why not let a favorite story shape your next trip?

Some trip suggestions:

• Go back to school: Anne of Green Gables (Prince Edward Island, Canada), The Catcher in the Rye (New York City), To Kill a Mockingbird (the deep American South), Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Germany), Oedipus Rex (Greece).
• Stop letting fiction satisfy your historical passions and head to the scene of the crime. Love Le Morte d’Arthur? The castles of the British Isles await, my lord. Into the American Great Depression? Follow Steinbeck to California’s Central Valley. World War II buff? Make like Michener and dive into your own tales of the South Pacific.
• Visit a favorite author’s stomping grounds. Tours are available of places like Edgar Allen Poe’s basement in Philadelphia, William Faulkner’s office in Mississippi, and Shakespeare’s birthplace in Warwickshire, England. Revel in the moveable feast of French scenery that inspired Ernest Hemingway.
• Ditch your cultural comfort zone. Think novels like King Solomon’s Mines (Africa), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Colombia), A Passage to India, and The Joy Luck Club (China).

Once you’ve picked your destination, get psyched by rereading the tale. Thumb the pages on the plane or reread the story in the actual locale itself, when you can literally see the images coming alive.

My favorite literary pilgrimage was inspired by Victor Hugo’s epic Les Misérables, partially set in Montreuil-sur-Mer. Visiting this village in northern France was a glorious finale to the Les Misérables pilgrimage I’d started in Paris a week before.

Montreuil-sur-Mer is tiny, claiming only a few thousand residents. It takes approximately 15 minutes to cross the entire village. Medieval ramparts cradle the town and narrow streets wind between curving rows of weathered concrete buildings. Modern shops like internet cafes, pharmacies, and lingerie peek through the layers of history.

I walked around this exquisite gem of a storybook town for hours. Soon, I began to recognize faces. During the day, I stood near the ramparts at dusk or lingered near the school to gaze down into the valley below. I feasted on briny mussels at dinnertime. I soon learned that I wasn’t alone in finding delight in Montreuil’s literary cache when I discovered a chocolate shop named Chocolats Les Misérables, a boutique named Gavroche, and – what else? – a lingerie shop named Les Dessous de Fantine.

Four years later, I can still lose myself imagining where Valjean’s factory must have been or where a desperate Fantine sold her hair. I’m sure it must have been in the town square, where I found a farmers’ market. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that in 1817, that square could have housed a hair vendor.

Where will your literary pilgrimage take you?