Enough with the road less traveled.

Quaint towns, remote valleys, and “the Europe no one knows about” have, in fact, become tediously familiar destinations in modern travel writing. Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day is the story of straight-up, cliché-ridden tourism, a journey firmly on the beaten path and an exploration of how, exactly, the path got so beaten in the first place. Most of all, it is the irreverent tale of what happens when an inexperienced traveler decides to tour the continent and its overrun sites with a hopelessly outdated guidebook, a 1963-1964 edition of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day.

First released in 1957, this was the tome that essentially invented the modern guidebook—leading the way for the likes of Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and Rick Steves. It also coincided with a tipping point in tourism—in the late 1950s, Europe welcomed (or at least tolerated) some 800,000 American visitors annually, a number that rose to 4 million by the early 1970s and to nearly 12.3 million in 2007. One of those early tourists was my mother, who in 1967—the UN’s International Tourist Year—set off with a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day to explore the continent for ten weeks. She and my father exchanged dozens of letters and postcards, all of which they have kept stashed in shoeboxes for four decades.

Guided solely by my parents’ correspondence and my obsolete guidebook, I sought to re-trace the old hippie backpacker route, to see how far I could get using those documents and nothing else, to connect the dots between that era of travel and my own, and to see if there were, in fact, any stories left to tell on that all-too-beaten path.

With stops in eleven cities listed in Frommer’s book, Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day is the tale of my journey into the Brave New Old World of the modern European tourist experience, a droll personal narrative that examines how this experience has changed—and has not—in the last generation.