Season 5 Ep. 103 Travel Expectations with Amber Share and Suzanne Roberts 9-1-21

2021-08-31

Lots of people travel around Labor Day and start thinking about fall break adventures so this week’s episode is jam-packed with travel writing. We chat with two guests this week. Our first guest is not a writer, but a graphic designer who began making cool illustrated posters of national parks on an Instagram account called Subpar Parks. Amber Share couples her illustrations with terrible one-star Yelp reviews those parks receive from visitors who weren’t terribly impressed with majestic things like The Grand Canyon and Old Fai...

Lots of people travel around Labor Day and start thinking about fall break adventures so this week’s episode is jam-packed with travel writing. We chat with two guests this week.

Our first guest is not a writer, but a graphic designer who began making cool illustrated posters of national parks on an Instagram account called Subpar Parks. Amber Share couples her illustrations with terrible one-star Yelp reviews those parks receive from visitors who weren’t terribly impressed with majestic things like The Grand Canyon and Old Faithful. Those illustrations have gone viral and she recently collected them all in book format and included facts about each national park from park rangers. Her book, SubPar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors is a New York Times Bestseller.

Our second guest is writer Suzanne Roberts, who National Geographic named a “Next Great Travel Writer.” Her most recent book, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, has received many awards including the Independent Publisher Book Award and National Indie Excellence Awards. She weaves a story of maturing as a woman and becoming a veteran traveler. Her book will make you laugh but it also gets serious, and those serious essays make her humor seem all the more poignant.

You can find Amber Share on social media at @subparparks or at her website www.ambersharedesign.com. And Suzanne Roberts can be found on instqgram @suzanneroberts28 or on her website at www.suzanneroberts.net

Books Mentioned in This Episode:
1- SubPar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors by Amber Share
2- Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love & Travel by Suzanne Roberts
3- My Antonia by Willa Cather
4- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
5- Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
6- The Innocents by Michael Crummey
7- The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
8- Dispatches from Pluto: Lost & Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant
9- The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner