Wondering how to sate your travel urges during COVID? Answer: crack open an armchair travelogue or two. One option: Mother Tongue Publishing on Salt Spring Island has an eclectic collection of travel pieces from Trevor Carolan, a BC-based poet and educator. Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World gathers nineteen pieces recounting trips taken by Carolan over the years, often accompanied by his equally intrepid wife, Kwan-shik, to almost everywhere “on the dharma trail.” The wanderings stretch in time from 1968 (a trip taken as a teenaged reporter to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district during its flower power peak) to the present day (a visit to Laos, where “the Mekong chugged along unrelentingly down the way”), and around the globe from Marrakesh to West Bengal to Nepal. Along the way are side trips to pay homage (as Patti Smith also likes to do) to various literary role models and influences: to Hemingway’s corner table in Cojimar, Cuba; to the grave of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński; and to the former Beat Hotel in Paris, home (at one time) to Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs. Another option: why not try to make your way across Russia to the Ukraine in the chaotic aftermath of the Russian Revolution? To do so: check out Teffi’s Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (NYRB), and wonder (as I did) just how she managed to maintain her sense of humour and sangfroid while travelling through a lawless landscape, “down the map, down the huge green map across which, slantwise, was written The Russian Empire,” always subject to the whims of capricious bureaucrats, and gun-toting desperadoes encountered along the way. Another fun adventure to experience vicariously is described in Blue Sky Kingdom (Douglas & McIntyre), Bruce Kirkby’s absorbing account of the three months he, his wife Christine, and their two young boys (ages seven and three), spent in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the isolated Himalayan valley of Zanskar, in north-west India. Who needs a travel agent when you’ve got a good travel book in hand?