Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Pacific Northwest Trips (Regional Travel Guide)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I live in the Pacific Northwest wine country and prior to that in the Portland area so I was curious if this book would be helpful to send along with visitors to our area. If the Washington wine section is any indication of the others, the areas covered are very cursory which maybe they have to be when covering an entire region. The book is a great idea but would benefit from a few tweaks to it.

This book does well in the more remote areas of the northwest where sites are fewer and therefore the book can be all encompassing. For example, the Prehistoric Trip is one we took a few years back and this book does a good job of covering that area thoroughly.

If you are heading to Portland or Seattle and have a very short time to see as much as you can, this book can be a real asset. If you want a lot of detailed information, you need a book that covers that city more specifically.

The biggest problem with this book is that a lot of the places the book recommends visiting require another resource to find. The maps in the book might get you to the general area but you definitely need a better map or a computer to access the locales website for directions. The book directs you to its own site at www.lonelyplanet.com/trip-planner but I found the site difficult to use for specific trips; searching "Wenatchee, Washington," one of this books trip destinations, resulted in "0 results" likewise with "Prehistoric Oregon Trip" another trip suggested in the book.

Also, I am a visual person so a picture now and then in the book would make it more appealing.

It is a handy little resource that would work well for day trips but it has its limits.

Living in the region covered by "Pacific Northwest Trips" gives me the perspective to be aware of what's NOT in the book as well as what is. My take on it is that it is geared toward the young, "we're too hip to do do what all the tourists do" traveler. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want to see all a region has to offer, you probably want an additional guide or two on top of this one. Especially if you're looking for lodging along the way!

The back of this guide claims "family-friendly" listings throughout, but I didn't see many at all. In fact, many of the recommended tours are wine tasting tours, pub tours and brewery tours (in other words, not for families!). In fact, for the "48 hours in Portland" tour, it says "We'll start with the obvious: handcrafted beer...". Then, the 48 hours in Portland includes trips to pubs, clubs (one even being a strip club "with history" LOL) and walking on bridges. No mention of the great Portland Zoo? Again, my complaint is that it's not family-friendly at all. On a related note, I didn't see mention of tours and their facilities to accomodate persons with physical disabilities. In a way, this guide assumes you're young (the music playlist suggestions are silly, in my opinion. I don't need a travel guide to tell me what to listen to on my car stereo), without family, and physically strong.

What I like about the guide is that it has beautiful photography, has some quirky and amusing quotes from locals about their regions, towns and cities, and while the guide has a lot of information, it still retains a laid-back style in tone. It doesn't come across as being really overwhelming with too much information.

I will use this guide with reservations I'm afraid.

Now I have to preface this by pointing out that this is not your grandfather's travel guide. The main purpose of this guide is to provide ideas for various trips in a particular geographical area. It is not intended to be a traditional travel guide. After you figure out which trips (or which places mentioned in the trips) you want to visit, then you have to do some more homework in planning it all out. It is not a giant list of things available per city.

So with that as an introduction, this is a very handy idea book. It features 52 pre-planned trips covering the beautiful Pacific Northwest, with Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland being the major cities in the area. In addition to the 52 trips, it also has "day trips" for the aforementioned big cities. The various trips are organized and indexed in the front of the book in different ways, so you can quickly scout by state, or by various subjects of interest (eg historical, food and wine, etc). This is part of a cololrful preview at the start of the book.

That is the first part of the book, it is about 30 pages or so. The meat of the book are the trips themselves, presented sequentially. Each trip features the different places of interest and in some cases it also has radio station recommendations, in case you are detached from the internets.

Again, I must stress, this is not a traditional travel guide, but a field-trip idea box!

We took our first trip to the Portland area this summer, a get-away for just my husband and myself, and we got some great ideas from this book.

We just went for a long weekend so only a few of the trips were even possible but we got some great ideas for thing to do in town and on Sunday took a day trip to the Columbia River Gorge, and the fruit loop that was a wonderful and very beautiful trip.

The only negative for me was that many of the trips were for much longer journey so we were really limited as to what we could get from the book. I would have some more shorter trips.

If you want some new and unusual ideas for trips, like a Brewery Jaunt, Oddball Oregon or Secret Seafood Spots, this book has them and much more.

My first exposure to the TRIPS series of Lonely Planet travel guides was Carolinas Georgia & the South Trips, The (Regional Guide) and, honestly, I wasn't very impressed. Fortunately I have better things to say about this book covering Oregon, Washington, and the southern part of British Columbia. I considered myself somewhat of an expert on the area having lived in both states and even our neighboring Canadian Province to the north. Still, I was surprised to find so many new and interesting locations that it makes me want to move back there.

This isn't a book containing lavish photography as only a few photographs grace the first 20 pages inside the front cover. The single page map isn't extensive so you'll also need an atlas. Instead it's jam-packed with things to see and do in its 300+ pages. The different trips are arranged by theme from iconic (weeklong) to day trips, outdoors trips, historic and cultural and offbeat among others. The table of contents also arranges trips by the best season and the beginning page of each trip provides an estimated total distance of travel and estimated time to complete. I'm knocking off a star because I think this book, like the other, doesn't give the traveler much time to take in the different sights before they are forced to move onward (i.e. you have to see 25 different sights in the 48 hour Portland trip.)

The book does a good job covering the outdoor locations along the iconic Highway 101 coastline, Mt. Rainier, and the Columbia River. Offbeat trips include one of my quirky personal favorites, the Oregon Vortex in Gold Hill. A beat up mining camp turns into a gravitational freak of nature where things roll uphill and people you know grow tall and shrink before your eyes and on film. When I reviewed the other book, one of my complaints was about trips devoted only to food and drink. Considering the Northwest's many microbreweries and it's burgeoning wine and cheese industry, this suddenly becomes a plus and wine lovers and pub crawlers will find much to like.

Like the other book, I think the best use of this guide is to generate ideas of the things you would like to see and do. Still, you'll need to figure out the time you want to spend at the different locations and be prepared to skip a location or two. You don't want to drive all the way to see the World Largest Frying Pan and not have enough time to see the World Largest Egg would you? (pgs. 130-131)

Hope the review helped.

This is a handy guidebook and small enough to fit slip into your purse and/or tote bag. It takes the Pacific Northwest (British Columbia, Oregon and Washington) and breaks it down into suggested road trips of varying themes that should give the out-of-towner enough ideas to get a good flavor of the area as well as new weekend trip ideas for local natives like me.

The book is broken down into sections named Iconic Trips, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia as well as themes, i.e. routes, history and culture, food, etc. Within those categories you'll find itineraries like Olympic Odyssey, Wine Tours, Cheesemongers Cheese Trip (I _must_ do that one), Dippin' Down the Cascade and more. Many of the trips suggested cover areas I've traveled and I found they did a good job of covering the known and lesser known highlights (glad to see they mentioned getting off 101 for the Three Capes Drive in Oregon a must do, but they also mentioned hiking to the back of Oneonta Gorge and the last time I was through there it was blocked from a massive landslide and they had no hopes or funds to clear it. Been a few years though so I can't judge.

All in all a good well-rounded guide book, but I will agree with another reviewer who mentioned the maps in the books are only so helpful, you do need a larger road map to get your bearings. Only the first few pages have color pics, the rest of it is black and white with some green highlights.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, so I picked this book in the hopes that it would have good ideas for day trips. It does ... but the way it's organized makes it a little inconvenient to find them. The book is written as 52 themed trips, each one intended to take two days to three weeks. The themes are cute, but if you want a more basic listing of places to see and things to do in the PNW, you're better off with Lonely Planet's regular Washington, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest guide.

One of the only places in the US that I have not traveled yet is the Pacific Northwest. This is the third Lonely Planet travel guide that I've owned and all of them that I've gotten share similar traits. They are all written in a very conversational, light-hearted style that makes the reading experience just plain fun and informative. That is why I chose this book to compliment my other travel guides. They have already proven themselves to me and I enjoyed the process of reading through the various trips in this guide.

Lonely Planet has arranged all the trips into a number of classifications that makes choosing a specific trip fun. If you want to take an "Iconic" trip of the region, then there are subset of specific trips included in that group. If you wanted instead to take a trip that highlights "Food & Drink", then the appropriate trips of that type would be included there. There are other trip classifications such as "History & Culture", "Offbeat", "Outdoors" and "Day Trips" just to name a few.

The book includes several pages of photos in the front of the book but none of the actual itineraries include photos; just small maps. The maps are not really good enough to travel with however... you'd definitely want a better set of maps once you've begun your trip.

I like this series of travel guides by Lonely Planet because of their unique approach and entertaining writing style. The books are nicely sized making them easy to carry along or shove in your glove box.

5 stars.

This book covers 52 themed itineraries and 1009 local places to see in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska's Inside Passage.

Take a trip to Mt Rainier. At 14,411 ft. it is the highest peak in the Cascade Range. Hike along the Volcano Trail. Or perhaps you would like the Coast Starlight Train Journey aboard Amtrak best. Some of the Iconic Trips include the Native American Traditions Tour in British Columbia; the Eccentric Pacific Northwest tour where you can see the adorable sea lions in Sea Lion Caves in Florence, Oregon; or The Simpsons to The Shining which includes the Timberline Lodge and Mt. Hood, Oregon. Or take the trail that Lewis and Clark took.

If you are into food you can take the Cheesemonger's Cheese Trip at Juniper Grove Farm in Redmond, Oregon or visit the Beervana in Troutdale, Oregon; or even take a Willamette Valley Wine Tour in British Columbia.

If you are into History and Culture there are trips planned for those too. If you are more of a city person there is 48 hour trips planned for Vancouver, Portland and Seattle.

The book is laid out nice and easy to read. It gives how long the trips last, how many miles you cover, the best time of year to go, starting and ending points and tips for best places to eat and motels that are a little on the offbeaten track.

A really interesting series....