Bikes Store-4U

SHORT BIKE RIDES WESTERN WASHINGTON, 3rd Edition (Short bike rides) Park your car, put on your helmet, fill your water bottle, and discover the best way to see the sights in Western Washington - on two wheels. Biking is fun for the whole family, and whether you’re a dedicated cyclist or just want to have some fun with the kids on the weekend, a bike and a couple of hours are all you need to enjoy the carefully selected routes in this well-researched guide. Each ride includes precise written directions, excellent route maps, the level of difficulty, including mileage, safety tips, availability of food and facilities and vivid descriptions of points of interest.
Customer Review: A short ride for this book
Fortunately I only checked this book out from the library, but the condescending tone, vague directions and dining recommendations prompted me to review it here nonetheless. The snobbish tone pervades nearly all the ride descriptions, in turn disparaging tourism and tourists (I believe a cyclist would be a touring tourist!) and alternately being awed by Fort Worden as the supposed filming location of “An Officer and a Gentleman”. She missed the correct attribution in the description of Fort Casey of course. Perhaps she was too distracted by the innkeeper’s “(not a cyclist)” bathrobe.
Also take her “Eats” recommendations with a grain of salt. I’m certain that most of the fine dining establishments she suggests would not appreciate a sweaty textile athlete such as Wagonfeld dripping upon their tablecloth despite being clothed in “Capilene or Coolmax” as opposed to merely “plump and polyestered”.
To be fair, I did get a couple of ideas for some new areas to explore with my bike, but it certainly won’t be with her guidebook in my panier.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 at 6:12 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.