Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet USA & Canada on a Shoestring

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This review is for the 2005 edition of LP USA & Canada "Shoestring", the most recent version at time of writing.

PROS
Covers major cities and sights in USA and Canada
Geared to backpackers and budget travelers

CONS
Only 81 pages for all of Canada!
Thin coverage of USA

USA together with Canada is an enormous area. It is impossible to imagine a traveler seeing USA on one trip, let alone both. Covering both countries in 740 pages can only be done by picking highlights. By comparison, LP Canada (country guide) has 912 pages, and LP USA has 1176 pages.

I have always been amused by posters I have seen in other countries advertising a trip to USA - with pictures blending the Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building, the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Las Vegas "strip", and other things. And the cover of this book shows some of these with a Canadian "Mountie" and a "Moose Crossing" sign. While you could perhaps see all of these things in a two week trip, most of your vacation would be spent in an airplane, because they are far apart.

So a guide to USA AND Canada? I wonder who needs this book. I suppose someone might be interested in seeing NYC and Toronto and a few other places, or a west coast visit to LA, SF, Seattle, and Vancouver. But since this guide has not been updated since 2005, perhaps the audience is small. But if you are traveling with limited funds, making up the journey as you go along, it might be handy for you.

The scope of this book is so huge that it makes no attempts to cover, for example, Illinois. It does have a major section on Chicago, and a paragraph on Springfield, but my old home town, Peoria, is not even mentioned! Well, maybe that's just as well, as Peoria isn't much of a destination compared to the other sights in this book. But seriously, a paragraph on Starved Rock State Park, which is beautiful and has both historical and natural value, would have been appropriate, especially if you were driving from Chicago to Springfield.

On the other hand, Massachusetts enjoys much more substantial coverage. Boston is covered pretty well for the few pages allotted to it. Oddly, Brookline is covered in the Boston section, while Cambridge and Somerville are in the "Around Boston" section. These three cities are in the core of metro Boston, serviced by the same mass transit, and if not for crossing a river you may not know you were crossing into a different city.

The LP "shoestring" series includes volumes like this for many locations. It reflects LP's original target audience: backpackers and younger travelers. This audience is reflected in the choices of what is covered, and what is not. The focus on meals in economy. Lodgings tend to be low and mid-range; obviously there is no coverage on places where business travelers are likely to stay.

This book is not well suited for my purposes, yet I recognize that it may be useful to others. I would recommend getting city guides or region guides (which LP also has), or perhaps the country guides for USA or Canada instead of this book.