I’ll admit, I was sitting here, struggling for a topic when I received an email alerting me to Deborah Melkin’s latest blog post. So, to take a phrase from Pablo Picasso “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal”. To be clear, in this case, I’m borrowing an idea from Deborah, a great artist, I’m not. At least not in this case.

In the past few months I’ve come to realize how much I missed travel. I think many of have. But instead of listing real places I want to visit, I’m going to change things a bit and talk about a few fictional places I might enjoy visiting.

Firstly, Middle-Earth. Some may know that my twitter handle is @stridergdm. This came out of my youth of hiking parts of the Appalachian Trail. It’s common when signing into logbooks to adopt a trail name. Being a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings, I adopted Strider. I still use it. But online, I found Stridergdm was pretty much guaranteed to be unique. So, back to Middle-Earth. It is still one of the richest most fleshed out fictional worlds and there’s too much to see. But I suspect I would want to ride the plains of Rohan as dawn rose over the horizon. Sail up Anduin towards Osgiliath in its prime. Perhaps look over the fallen foundation of Barad-dur and then travel back to the First Age and see Gondolin. (yes, I’d want a bit of time travel too.) But simply put there is so much to see there.

Earth-Sea – To sail from the Gont to Havnor and visit some of the islands in between. I always found Ursula Le Guin a unique world, a world of only islands, no continents.

Dune – deserts have always fascinated me, but to visit a world that is entirely desert and life is focused on the lack of water intrigues me. Perhaps to enter Sietch Tabr in the evening as the Fremen are waking up, with the sunsetting at my back, casting my long shadow ahead of me. To break bread and share water with Stilgar and others. Then leave on a Highliner and visit the polar opposite, the ocean world of Caladan.

Mid-World – Of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. This is very much a broken world, not just the buildings of Lud, but physics itself where sometimes the Sun doesn’t rise in the East and time seems to flow strangely. But to perhaps visit the Halls of Gilead in their prime and then ride The Drop and overlook the Clean Sea, but finally to walk among the field of roses at Can’-Ka No rey and enter the Dark Tower itself.

Ringworld – it may be unstable, but is probably arguably the largest “world” of any I would want to visit. To look up at the Sun, always at Noon and to realize one could walk multiple lifetimes and still barely make their way around the world. It’s big enough that it has 1:1 maps of Earth and Mars.

Narnia – C. S. Lewis and Tolkien were comrades in arms and members of the inklings but had very different ideas of world-building and different ideas on the proper place for allegory. Tolkien was never a huge fan of Lewis’s Narnia because it hit the read over the head too much with allegory, but I still think it would be interesting to sail on the Dawn Treader to the edge of the world.

One Hundred Acre woods – Technically this is based on a real woods and one could visit it, but not with Pooh and Piglet. This place has a special place in my heart. It’s the first “real” book I ever owned. As a young child, I want to say 3 or 4, a friend of my father’s loaned it to me. More accurately to my father to read to me, but that’s just technicality. After it was read, I tried to return it as I had been taught, after all, it wasn’t mine, it was only loaned. But the owner (who I can’t recall) looked at me gravely and asked me if I enjoyed it and I affirmed I did. “It’s yours then. Keep it.” And I did. And I have since given it to my son.

Stephen King’s Maine – this is a fascinating world filled with a town taken over by vampires and where Mrs. Toad can find shortcuts. What else wonderful and scary things could be found there?

There are almost certainly other worlds, but I think I’ll stop here. While I can never visit any of the above places in reality, the beauty is I can visit time and time again anytime I pick up a book.