I bought a few guide books to plan a trip to Seattle, the city of my birth. With only a few days to spend, The title attracted me because it is the TEN BEST THINGS to do.

225 pages on TEN THINGS?

NO MAPS - all landmarks are the same print color, events tend to blend into one another. Also the book is large, not an easy fit into the purse.

I recommend Access Seattle, which is a great guide full of easy to read maps, wonderful reviews and an easy to read lay out! Also gives you clues into festivals different times of the year. Not to mention, a good size to fit into a bag.

I gave it two stars because the book is rich in history. So, it is an interesting read, but I would not plan a vacation around it.

This book has been very helpful in planning my first distance adventure by myself. Instead of reading EVERYTHING about Seattle, it narrows down things to the important information of opportunities that I have in my short week visit. This has been a great help in deciding upon B&Bs and hotels, baseball tickets, boat excursions, etc. It is a must read for planning a trip to Seattle.

This book covers the state reasonably well and will help you make good decisions about where to go and what to avoid. I used it during a recent three-week trip.

It's not superlative, so normally I wouldn't post. After reading the first two reviews, however, I almost didn't buy the book, so I wanted to persuade others that the author's frequent political intrusions need not push you away. His opinions do slant the narrative and make some of the sidebars less attractive, but I found them easy to ignore.

Given the absence of other guidebooks, the solid coverage of the food/lodging/activities stuff makes this a valuable resource. It's also consistent with Moon's emphasis on hidden places and the great outdoors. An added bonus is that the author has a talent for capturing the feel of a place; this doesn't suffer much because of his political views.

Those who've come to trust Moon publications shouldn't hesitate.

After reading some of the reviews on this book, I decided to reread The Idaho Handbook. The book that I read was quite a bit different than some of the reviews.

While the author's position on land-use is well documented throughout the book, I would hardly classify those views as extreme. Quite a few of the Idahoans that I talked with in the two weeks that I spent in Idaho last summer expressed real concerns regarding land-use throughout the state.

When I am looking for a tour book, I want something more than the AAA travel books. The book contains a significant amount of the history of the state. The book also contains all of the usuals for a tour book - an objective analysis of the lodging and food options in many small towns. This is very important as some parts of the state, the options are somewhat limited.

In addition, he covers the major (and many of the minor) attractions in the state. A number of these attractions were not found in other books.

I enjoy the Moon Guides a whole lot more than other guides. Their strength is that that they are written by people who spend a lot of time travelling throughout the state rather than the tourist areas. For example, Deke Castleman's Nevada Handbook dedicated 10-15% of the book on the Las Vegas area.

Idaho may not be everyone's idea of a "hot potato" destination. But if you want a clever, concise guide to a wonderful state -- this is it. Check out "Rural Bar Etiquette" on p. 78 for a sample of Root's humor.

This is not your average dry guide (Although Root's sense of humor is indeed dry!) You will find instead detailed descriptions and opinions(some very funny) which can help you decide the places that might be of special interest to you. It is one of the best guide books I have ever read.

I was looking for a reference book with names, makers, pictures, etc. This book is very basic and appears to be aimed toward a young reader.

This book was originally published in the mid seventies; it is nice to have a reprint available. Interiewing old cowboys in the 1950's, the author gained a great deal of primary source material in regards to what types of clothing and equipment were used. A great deal of drawings appear throughout the text. This book depicts the cowboy at his most practical. A good book, though a tad expensive.

I didn't expect this book to be about horse "packing," but I did expect it to provide useful ideas about horse "camping," and general information on back country techniques and practices. Unfortunately, this book is virtually nothing more than West's demeaning views about other backcountry users and an advertisement for his line of clothing and horse tack. Some of the information is questionable at best and lethal at worst, such as picketing a horse by the halter, or high lining a horse so that it can graze during the night.

Additionally, there is no information about horse first aid, nor horse nutrition/feed (West travels in the Rockies of CO so he just grazes his mounts on hard mountain grass, which for that environment is understandable but just one more limiting factor of this exceptionally limited book), maybe a paragraph pertains to any type of horse training. West does mention that one should bury one's own feces 6-8" in the earth (a recommendation neither feasible nor advisable in a rocky arid environment)but in his suggested equipment list a shovel is not mentioned.

Overall, if one is interested in learning about packing or even just camping with horses, there is no better book than Packin' In On Mules and Horses. That book is not only thoroughly informative, but written as the best of "how to" books are written: with advise on a number of options, and with compelling reasons for why the author prefers one option over the others.

A final disappointment about Have Saddle Will Travel is that it is published by Storey Books. Storey has published some great books, but this is certainly not one of them.

If you're interested the exercises the author does to stay in shape - this is the book for you.
If you're interested in getting into the nuts n' bolts of camping and packing with horses - this is NOT the book for you. Keep looking because this ain't it.
The meaningful information related to camping and packing with horses could be condensed to maybe ten pages.

This gentleman has a world of experience with horses and traveling the back country and it shows.

Reading his book is like sitting a the kitchen table with a cup of coffee with a good friend. It's full of good advise and tales of adventure and for a horseback rider full of ooohs and ooops.

It has inspired me personally to further explore the experiences possible on horseback in wilderness areas. But the information in this book is not just for camping, the general information and necessities list is well worthwhile for all trailriders.

I personally am hoping Mr. West puts pen to paper for an additional work.

I never did like Don and Roberta Lowe's hiking guides, but when I moved to Portland in 1977, they were they only game in town and I bought them all. This volume has a different format from all their others, which was more typical of hiking guides, containing a single, black and white photograph of a scene along each hike. This guide is larger format and loaded with sharp, well-printed color photographs. I know these hikes like the back of my hand, and their choice of photos is as mediocre as their text. They claim this is more a picture book than a hiking guide, but in fact the text for each hike follows their old plan of basically describing no more than what you can see on a good topo map. There is no "hype" in this book, oh, perhaps a few words at the beginning of each hike, but I always enjoy a little enthusiasm in my hiking guides and more descriptions of sights along the way. There are big disappointments. For example, they basically stop describing what Herman Creek Trail is like up to the Casey Creek Trail. But that's just where the going gets good, entering one of the most magnificent stretches of low elevation old growth in the Columbia Gorge. They don't even mention the climax at Cedar Swamp 7 miles in: a rare and awesome grove of enormous Western Red Cedars, one of the great treasures on this planet (so few of them remain). Then in the description of Eagle Creek, they don't even mention the horsetail falls just above Tunnel Falls, which for my money is a far more beautiful sight. I've always found Tunnel Falls rather harsh and forbidding. The unnamed horsetail falls just a quarter mile beyond is a gloriously graceful and awesome waterfalls, and it is almost sacreligious that they don't even mention it.

I seem to recall from one of their books written over 25 years ago that they want you to be surprised, and so may deliberately not describe the major highlights of a hike (besides trail junctions, which is about the only thing they talk about). This is a mistake. Mere words can't possibly give away the true magnificence of these hikes, so no matter how eloquent they might be at describing a particular attraction, there's no excuse for not going and seeing it for yourself. I keep going back to the same trails because the sights are so awesomely beautiful that my brain can't possibly retain the experience of actually being there, and I am forever surprised by the same sights year after year. So, please, hiking book writers, don't be shy about waxing ecstatic over outstanding features of a hike! Give us some incentive to go to these places! I can buy a map to see the trail junctions. I don't need what is in effect little more than a description of a map.

Frommer's is still trying to pack two very large states into 448 small pages. This new edition offers little difference from the last edition. They've obviously left a lot out. If you like going only where the tourists with money go, this book is adequate. Otherwise save your money. It's a good highlights book, but very weak for usable information.

First of all, never trust a guide book to Vegas which states "we don't gamble" (p. 31) and then tries to tell you which casinos are the best. This book is full of opinionated "top ten" lists which only appeal to a certain demographic. (Namely, the demographic which would drive all over town to find the number one 99-cent shrimp cocktail, and then would look for the number one spot to park the RV. Lucky for them, both lists are provided.)

Every traveler to Vegas should see Sehlinger's Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas, which would appeal to a wide variety of tourists. The younger crowd needs to check out Frommer's Irreverant Guide to Las Vegas.

I think Fine Edge makes some great recreation topo maps for mt. biking, but I was frequently disappointed by this book. It's written by groups of different authors, and as a result, it's way uneven. Some regions feature good, clear writing, others are almost shockingly bad. (Palm Springs cyclists will hate it.) I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but some of the route descriptions and maps got me lost, too. Maybe it was my fault, but I don't think so. For a company based in Bishop that makes such good recreation maps, the maps here seem especially lame. Bottom line: I'd buy this book for some of the regions, but not the others.

The words "Proven" and "Precise" made me assume that the data would have a high degree of accuracy. When the 5th waypoint I entered showed up 30 miles East of Bellingham instead of the Gulf Islands I suspected a problem. I thought I had found a typographic error that must have been part of the publishing process. I discovered from the publisher's web site that there is a long list of other errors that you want to be aware of and it didn't include the one I found.

I emailed the author, Kevin Monahan, and was told "The error was one degree which is 60 miles, it comes from misreading the edge of the charts as you move along the latitude line near a full degree mark." In the errata sheet there were many others with the one degree error.

If Kevin is right about the source, then these waypoints were never actually used, nor were then even entered into a charting package, or a plotting GPS. Both units would clearly have shown up errors this large.

Needless to say I am going to be very careful how I use the data. Fortunately I do have a charting GPS, which is how the first error showed up.

I did not like this guide. It gives little sense of the "spirit" of each island, seeming rather to be a list of "drive here, drive there" with occasional useful information, but little commentary on the sights. Personally, I prefer a guidebook that will tell me what is tourist-hokey and what is worth seeing. No websites listed in the accommodations section (which is pretty sketchy). Look up "sailing" and it just lists names and phone numbers of boats -- no indication of available tours, prices, comparative quality. Ditto with snorkeling, a list of places to snorkel, no info on where to rent gear or tour options. Frommer's Caribbean was a better resource.