A Sand County Vacation

Next on our adventuresome list is A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.  And as a quick aside, the copy that I read also had excerpts from another Leopold book, Round River.  Now, Sand County is not a real place, in that there is no place called that.  But, it's real in that it's based on the location where Leopold had his sort of vacation house.  So, real place, but not real name.  The main oomph of the book was set in Wisconsin and takes the reader through a year on this property, month by month.  It was beautiful, it was relaxing, and I enjoyed it very much.

Now, nothing against Round River, but I found the second half of the book to be a trifle dry.  I wanted to learn more about the beauty of bird song and how trees are sawed down, not to be be beaten over the head with talk of conservation.  Don't get me wrong: conservation is so, so important!  But, it made for less than thrilling reading.  This is an example of one of those books were I can tell right away that I'm not the target audience...and that's okay.  Still, I enjoyed the lazy days spent in Sand County, and, to a lesser extent, those on Round River.

States Visited: Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah