Journal 9

I love to travel. I love everything about it. If I had to tell of my favorite part of traveling it would have to be the anticipation of, and the traveling too – I’m not sure why, I have just always been like that. Ever since I was little, going on trips to the Outer Banks with my family, my favorite part of the trip was the drive down. I loved packing the car and getting ready to go, and especially the feeling I got as we passed through different states and seeing familiar landmarks – which told me that we were getting close. Taking a look at my future trip to Italy, I feel that the anticipation and planning will be a very big part of it - the biggest reason being that I will only have my backpack with me. No hotel reservations, no check in times, just me and the road. Having said that I feel that a style of writing which we have discussed, which fits perfectly is Mark Twains, Roughing It. The other would be the Cloud Forrest because Matthesein goes about describing everything he sees. Connection, because Italy will be entirely new to me, and I think that will be a large part of my writing, will be about sites which I see. This may be a problem though, considering that I have no actually been there before.

Twain has a very comical outlook about his travel out west with his brother. When reading his work, I actually got the impression that nothing was taken seriously by him. Twain could be considered a novice when looking at this reading, considering it was his first – which appeared to be told as though he was writing a story about his travels, not necessarily a journal.

Matthesien is very descriptive about his writings. I felt as though I was reading an account for everything that was happening – which is my opinion of what a travel log is intended to be. Matthiesen seems to take a much more serious tone about his writing than what Twain does because let’s face it, Twain is very lax.

Similarly, both write about what happens in their travels, Twain with a narrative account, Mattheisen with a description of each account. Both styles do a get job of personifying the journeys taken by each travel, which in turn gives the reader the sense of being in the travels with the writers.