Cafe Hours: Essays on Travel by an Emerging Curmudgeon

Travel essays may be fun to write, as this collection shows; but when a research trip goes horribly wrong and the author is robbed of his possessions in Barcelona, he struggles with emotions that may derail his objective views of the city and destroy his joy of travel. Only the final leg of his journey, a stay in Paris, may heal the wounds of a paranoid week in the Catalan capital. But can even the City of Lights restore the sense of youth and innocence that the author started out with?