10 of the best: nature photographs.

Beautiful, but looks sooooo cold!

We are alike on that, Saab. In my now distant past, I wanted to open a travel bookstore with a large space for literature from different countries. I even got to first base with the idea (airport shops with travel books and destination literature at the terminals) with the Borders book chain, but the guy who liked the idea disappeared into corporate space.

Now there's a photo, Panz.

Let that not hit my wee abode!

Seaside, Havana

Wow.

This is what it can look like from the street on the Malecon.

Oh how I love the sea! In awe of it, respect it, but love it all the same.

My coastline, Maybe not so impressiv - for me very special

What a nice idea!!
I would have been your customer.
In the distant past people trevelled slower than today - even with shorter vacations.
I have a Baedecker from long before distant past - it is like three weeks in London. Added are thr surroundings in case you have more than three weeks.
Now the travelbooks are something like three days in London.

It looks pretty spectacular to me. Where is this particular piece of coast?

A Baedecker? Used to be invaluable in the home of every would-be traveller. I think they are still published, but not of such great importance nowadays. It must have been wonderful to have gone on Grand Tours of the world which lasted for weeks or months. As you say, vacations are taken at high speed nowadays - very little leisurely travel.

The West coast of Sweden.

Never been, but it sounds like a spectacularly beautiful country.

Sundaymorning - reading the paper there is a long article that would interest both you and me.
Travel with novels. More and more people like to travel to place(s) described in books. More and more towns and cities have guided tours according to what happens in a certain book.
There is a hotel in New York which is recommended Library Hotel.
When Astrid Lindgren´s stories were showed on TV people traveled to Vimmerby. Very unexpected so tourism there had to go to England to study how to handle the situation.
Very popular is Harry Potter trips, Wallander in Ystad. England do have a many litteratur trips.

Named for the Roman emperor who commissioned it in A.D. 122, Hadrian's Wall stretches 73 miles (117 kilometers) across northern England from coast to coast.

It can even be detrimental in some views. The Dan Brown books have made some cities in Italy (Volterra is one, if I remember) infested with tourists who are not so much interested in history as the "story" in a novel. However, presently, people in Florence/Firenze are looking forward to the publishing of his new novel about Dante, as tourism has been down by 10% and the tourists that do go have been spending less.

On Wallander, I've liked the Mankell books I've read. A fair part of why I read police procedural books is to "visit" different countries; thus I've visited Sweden and Norway and the Netherlands, and France, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Japan... and many other countries in my mind through the books. Of those, I've only been to Mexico and Italy in actual life.

The book described below tells about all of Sweden except the part I comefrom. The geese just flew over. That´s the reason my mother did not read the book to me. Otherwise she did read a lot.

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a work of fiction by the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf.

The background for publication was a commission from the National Teachers Association in 1902 to write a geography reader for the public schools. "She devoted three years to Nature study and to familiarizing herself with animal and bird life. She has sought out hitherto unpublished folklore and legends of the different provinces. These she has ingeniously woven into her story."

One can travel with maps, guidebooks and novels at home and learn a lot.
One can travel to a country and see nothing else but the beach and the next bar.