An Artist and a Writer Travel Highway 1 South

This beautiful travelogue is a collaboration between Pat Hunter, a watercolor artist, and Janice Stevens, a travel writer, and it shows such promise at first glance. Alas, that promise is not fulfilled. An Artist and a Writer Travel Highway 1 South is the third book of their series traveling from the Oregon border all the way south to Mexico along the famed Highway 1 of the California coast. Together they seek out and cover historic and interesting sites, trying to avoid the more touristy spots. They start their journey at Oxnard and eventually arrive at the Mexican border in fourteen chapters, which represent so many breaks in the trip. This is a very detailed travelogue, about half text and half watercolors (over hundred-and-thirty) of the places they have seen. The location map at the beginning of the book is good to orient the reader. The text is interspersed with many quotations and sidebars listing the points of interest at each new location. Each painting has a nice, brief caption. The text is rather dry and insipid, a simple listing of what they observed that lacks good, engaging writing. The paintings are nice, but eventually they feel to be the same and even get a little boring.