Shopping Find – Great Gift for Mileage Runners (and Other Weekend Warriors)

I stumbled into my local Anthropologie yesterday to take advantage of their Summer Tag Sale.  (Yes, I’m a sucker for all things Anthro!)

I was on the hunt for a cute white dress for my upcoming trip to Seattle for my sorority’s international convention.  While I didn’t find the dress, I did manage to score a couple of tops and a dress off the sale rack, four bright red cereal bowls, and these gems:

They were marked down to $12.95 from their original price of $29.99.  Each contains a write up (taken from the original column in The New York Times) about 60 different cities within the specified region and how to spend a 36-hour weekend visit there (restaurant recommendations, interesting tourist attractions, and general suggestions).

I could have totally used these back in my heavy mileage running days when I’d often have a very short period of time to see all of the highlights of a particular destination, particularly since almost all the popular Asian mileage run destinations are included.

Nowadays, I can see this coming in handy as a cruise resource.  If I’d had this for my last two Caribbean cruises, I would have had a jump start on my port research for all of the spots we visited.  I’m already eyeballing it for my next trip to maximize time in cities I’ve already visited to quickly get around.  The Caribbean/Latin America version includes most  of the common cruise ports.

I found these on the sale table in the housewares section.  It appears there are two more books in the series (Europe and USA) as well as a series of more detailed regional US guides, but these were the only versions I located at my local store.  These don’t appear to be listed in the sale section on anthropologie.com so the may be an in-store only find.

For me, these cross the line between Jetsetter gear and Homestead accessory.  I’ll definitely put them to use for planning for my trips although they will serve dual-duty as coffee table books/conversation pieces at home due to the beauty of the books themselves.  I can picture myself picking them up to browse through with a glass of wine when I’ve had a rough day and need to fantasize about my next escape!