A Fan's Playground

To find out why I chose to read this book you have to look backwards in my life QUITE A FEW YEARS. Like, a dozen years at LEAST. As a kid I had this book called "Horses Forever" by Lawrence Scanlan - it's a nonfiction book about why horses have so much appeal to people. I reread it a LOT for a few years, during my most horse-obsessed age. And in one part of Horses Forever there's reference made to Tschiffely's Ride, apparently in glowing enough terms that I remembered the name for a dozen years as something I wanted to read. Gosh. That is an IMPRESSIVE FEAT given the generally poor state of my memory!

Anyways, fast-forward those dozen or so years, and I was wandering a used bookstore and saw Tschiffely's Ride on a sale shelf for like one buck. I was immediately like SOLD and then I took it home and put it on my bookshelf and didn't touch it for several years. (I am SO GOOD at reading things on my to-read list...) But! Finally I have read it!

It's a nonfiction book written by a white dude in the 1930s who randomly decided he wanted to travel on horseback from where he was working in Buenos Aires, Argentina all the way to Washington DC, something everyone said wasn't doable. Because he was bored and wanted adventure. This trip involves a lot of deserts and mountains and other such fun things. It took him 2 1/2 years. And he wrote this book after his successful completion of the journey!

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