Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was excited to see a travel memoir in this month's First Reads selections. As a not-outdoorsy type who is aware of the therapeutic value of nature, I was hoping this would encourage me to get outside more once the dreary winter weather passes. Instead, I found this book to be a lot of oversharing and complaining with some nature thrown in. The author makes a plan over the course of several years to visit 62 national parks in a year. She saves up enough money, quits her job, outfits a van, and says goodbye to her boyfriend and their/his home. What follows is a series of trips back and forth between national parks and her Los Angeles home base. I feel like she does a better job at first of identifying the parks and talking about specifics of each and her treks through them, but as the book continues, she glosses over her park experiences so quickly that much of the time I can't keep track of what park/state she's even in at that point. I think what rubbed me the wrong way as the book progressed was the amount of complaining she does. It's constant. I had to keep reminding myself that this is a person who was able to save enough money to quit her job for a year and travel around the country with literally no responsibilities to anyone except herself and the option to settle anywhere when she's done with her travels. Somehow, she's miserable because her schedule is too tight. She's offended when there are crowds of tourists in the parks she wants to visit. She's miserable when she's alone but also miserable when she's with her boyfriend or other friends. She's miserable on the road and miserable back at home. She keeps saying she needs to figure out who she is on her own but seems to always be looking for people to travel with or date. She's always crying. I love that she's willing to share her mental health struggles and get help for them, but the complaining dominated the book. There is also an uncomfortable amount of oversharing throughout the book: about her genitals and sex life, about the unethical activities she participates in to circumvent COVID lockdowns and/or stick to her schedule, about the habits and behaviors of the people around her. Because her year overlapped the initial COVID lockdowns, there were some interesting situations she had to navigate regarding park closures and fears of exposure during her travels. However, I feel like she kept telling us how she was wearing masks (sometimes her thickest ones!) to prove how safe she was being, while also hooking up with strangers, taking a charter flight while she had scarlet fever, staying in hotels, seemingly constantly meeting friends in restaurants, and lying about her illness to get a vacation rental where she could recuperate when she did eventually get COVID. I get that it was a weird time where we all had to make sometimes-conflicting decisions, but there were some real head-scratchers in her discussions of safety and risk. I really wish she had gone more into the actual details of her trip. How did she prepare? What did her itinerary look like, and how did she decide how often to return to Los Angeles? How did she know how much money to save or where she would be able to park her van or take showers? One of the things she did really well was adjust to changing conditions, and I wish she had talked more about that. She seems to be very strong at adapting and staying flexible when things don't go exactly as planned, and she could have explored or focused on that much more. At the end of the day, I don't really understand what I just read. The author didn't seem to reach any real conclusions about herself but constantly references or participates in a mix of Buddhist/Hindu/new age rituals and philosophies that I think we're supposed to believe are reflections of what she's learned...? She tried to tie it all up nicely at the end after one good night of sleep after a week of hell adjusting to new medication. Based on the title of the book, I expected there to be some real revelations here from a woman striking out on her own for a year and being awed by the natural wonders around her. I guess I just didn't relate to the author at all or find that she was able to convey anything profound about her time in nature.