Good topic!

England, because of all the books I have read that were set there. Visiting made me realize that book-England no longer exists, and indeed, probably never did, but I like the real England as well. I keep the overlay of fiction-England in my mind to call on when I need it.

Peru and Macchu Pichu because of reading Robert Silverberg's very dated book Lost Kingdoms and Vanished Civilizations as a child. Also I studied anthropology on the strength of that book, so much did it affect me. Macchu Pichu did not disappoint me.

New Zealand, based on the LotR movies. Tom had wanted to go for years but I was not interested until I saw the movies. The glorious South Island actually exceeded my expectations and we went back for a second trip. I would go again.

Various gardens (Longwood, Huntington, others) after reading about them in garden books. Reality is better because you can never really quite picture them in your mind, or get a full sense from photographs. And the occasional weed keeps me from feeling too discouraged about my own efforts!

Rosefolly

England was also at the top of my list due to all the books I'd read about it over the years. I've been to London and thereabouts twice and would go again in a heartbeat. I've also read enough books set in Scotland, Ireland and Wales to want to go there, as well. Now if only I had months to travel and unlimited funds! From a literary standpoint if I did have an opportunity to get to London again I'd certainly be heading for 221B Baker Street with a renewed interest in Sherlock Holmes.

As a teen I read James Michener's The Drifters, a book about a group of 19 - 22 year old kids (several of them Americans) meandering around Europe trying to find themselves and avoid the US draft. There were many places in that book that intrigued me, but to this day the one thing from the book I would like to see is the running of the bulls in Pamplona. I was lucky enough to get to Madrid once, but nowhere near Pamplona.

I would also love to see New Zealand and while I will certainly borrow Rosefolly's idea and link that to LoTR, to be honest I've wanted to see NZ and Australia for as long as I can remember -- no literary enticement necessary.

I could write and write and write about all the books that have made want to visit the places they describe...condensing to just a few is hard for me!

England is a given. When I was a kid, I thought England must be the most interesting place on earth. After living there for several years and visiting umpteen times, I'll still say it is, although most of my romantic notions about it have long since evaporated. Was there one particular book that enticed me to England? No, it had to have been the accumulative effect of many books.

Rosefolly, Machu Picchu is stunning, isn't it? I can't even remember what book I read as a child that got me interested in going there, but the book hardly did justice to the real thing. The same with Nazca, but I think it was a biography of the female anthropologist who studied the area for decades that convinced me I had to see it for myself. It wasn't Erich von Daniken, although I think his theories are entertaining hoots! :-)

I also think New Zealand is magnificent, especially the South Island. I can attribute my long-time obsession with Captain Cook to my wanting to see NZ. I have absolutely no interest in LoTR, and must admit that I got rather tired of the all the references to the film locations that all the well-meaning but misguided locals seem to think all visitors want to see.

It took me far too long to get to Australia. It was Picnic at Hanging Rock (the book and later the film) and probably all the Arthur W. Upfield mysteries I devoured and The Fatal Shore (Robert Hughes) that signified Australia was/is a helluva beautiful and interesting place! The only problem I have: it takes so long to get from place to place in Australia; it's just so big, something that I hardly realized before actually being there.

Well, I've wanted to see Iceland ever since I read about it in primary school. My DH has been there many times and he can talk a blue streak about everything he likes about it: the volcanoes, of course, since he's a geophysicist.

Isak Dinesen is responsible for my forays into Kenya. She's a wonderful writer, but again I've felt she hardly gave me a clue of what to expect. Of course her era was long past by the time I got there, and things have changed irrevocably. I've seen her house "Karen," though and maybe it did fulfill my notions.

I have read so much about the famous mummies of Urumchi that the Tarim Basin is my current most-want-to-see place.

After reading "The Cloister and the Hearth" years ago, I always wanted to time-travel back to that period in old Europe.

After I read "Two Under the Indian Sun" by the Godden sisters, I fancied I wanted to see India. Now, not so much.

"Master Skylark" had me longing to time-travel back to Shakespearian England, being an Anglophile. Likewise "Adam of the Road" which I read as a girl.

Read a number of books set in the Cotswolds, so was happy to visit there some years ago, as well as Wales. They both lived up to my expectations, I do believe.

England for me, too, and Frieda summed my feelings up quite nicely except I've never had the opportunity to live there. I did spend a month once touring all of Great Britain and Ireland and have made a number of daytrips from London to outlying cities on my daughter's and my several trips there. I've been blessed to travel to lots of places, but nothing calls to me like London. I do like the rest of England, too, and remember reading a book once in which a young male descendant of a family that emigrated to the U.S. was made nostalgic at the scent of lilacs not knowing that his English great-grandmother had raised and loved them. It gives one pause.

Sheriz6, we went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum and it was fun, but while I've read all the stories, I don't really remember them well. The rooms are set up with memorabilia, much of which was lost on me. What was the most fun was that when we left and were walking back to the tube stop, Sherlock himself, complete with cape, cane, and deerstalker (I know, I know), came walking down the street toward the flat.

I visited Rye in Sussex which is the real town of Tilling in the Lucia books. It is exactly laid out as written.
Dublin because of the Maeve Binchy books.
I was fortunate in staying with my French penfriend who lived in the Loire Valley.
We were able to go to some of the fabulous chateaux I had read about in the historical novels I devoured as a teenager!

For me it would be Paris and Spain.

Woodnymph is right. I long to time travel to temporal as well as spatial settings of beloved books, round trip visits only. Of course I would want to be fully immunized and loaded with antibiotics.

Well, being a huge Tolkien fan, I always wanted to go to Middle Earth. When I went to New Zealand, long before I ever heard of Peter Jackson, I figured that was as close as I would ever get. I sometimes wonder how I could retire there.

To my surprise, I loved the Sherlock Holmes museum at 221B Baker Street. A friend dragged me there, but I found it fascinating. It is, I understand, an authentic Victorian middle-class residence. People really lived in those little cluttered rooms, with a housekeeper who brought their meals up those narrow, dark staircases. I went through it several times, imagining what it must have been like actually living there. Obviously it made quite an impression on me, as I can remember it vividly all these years later.

I've never been to Sweden or Iceland, would love to visit those countries. I can't think of a specific book, just an amalgam of many years of reading.

I suppose living in England, I am spoilt for book-related places that I've visited, 'though not necessarily because of any book in particular.
Nor am I as well-travelled as so many of you are from the US. What is it about marriage to a teacher and three children that make the practicality of 'getting away' little more than a dream; and do US/Aus teachers earn as little as they do/did over here?!
I do remember once many years ago visiting Switzerland with three other girls. Two of them were quite content to sleep all morning, play cards during the late afternoon and hit the night-spots until the small hours. I was more ambitious, so the remaining friend and I planned an 'expedition' to climb/steep walk the local mountain. Luckily the girl on the hotel desk offered to come with us as it was her day off, or we would be a heap of sun-bleached bones beneath a crag.
She led us up mountain tracks all kept in good Swiss order by the local walking groups and we ate our lunch on the summit . . .rather ruined by the crowds who had made the journey up on the mountain railway!
It was on the much more tiring walk on the way down that I was reminded of Heidi. We went through alpine fields totally unspoilt by tourists, cows munching grass and the roofs of chalets in the distance. It was then we heard the call of the alpen horn echoing from across the valley. Our Swiss 'guide' told us that these were traditionally blown in the evening as a 'prayer' of thanks.
This was way back in the mid 60's and I wonder if the tradition is still carried on?

Funny you mention Heidi as I just picked that up, soldiered through half of it and then put it down again. Perhaps the story was a bit tedious, but the scenery was spectacular. I've never been to Switzerland but my sis has and describes it as one of her favorite places.

I always wanted to travel with Gerald Durrell on one of his animal-collecting trips. In real life, I'm not sure how much fun it would have been, but for an 11-year old girl in rainy Bedford and was obsessed with animals, it was a lovely dream to have....

Or go to Mallory Towers - that would have been fun as well.

Oh, the Greek Islands - those of Ancient Greece, not modern-day, sundrenched, holiday 'playgrounds'. And the seas and oceans in between the islands.....The voyages of Odysseus.....

'The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece,
'Where burning Sappho loved and sang -'
(Byron)

We would have gone on visits, but didn't want to spoil what was in our heads and have it replaced by a modern holiday brochure 'dream'. And Stan always said, 'suppose we land up on the wrong island.....?'

I'll never go now, so it will always remain the same inside my head. I'm not sorry.

Dido, I feel the same about Corfu in the era between the world wars, as described by Gerald Durrell in My Family and Other Animals. It was somewhat touristy even then, but the countryside seems to have been pretty unspoiled by tourism infrastructure. Now it apparently has a hotel in every other cove and is pretty crowded.

Oh Netla! Such nostalgia! And there was Laurie Lee 'As I walked out one Midsummer Morning'.... That was in the '30s. Do you know L.L.? Such a wonderful writer.There's nowhere left these days, that isn't turned into a 'sundrenched holiday playground.' Oh Yuk! I'll stay put in rainy old Wales and live in my head. Do you know Elizabeth Bishop's poem, 'A question of travel'? She says, 'Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?'

I also fantasized about going to Corfu after recently reading the Durrell book Netla mentioned above. However, I am sure it is nothing like Durrell experienced now. It is a wonderful book!
I also wanted to visit the Channel Islands after reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page.
And, I have wanted to visit Wales for a long time after seeing it in TV series.

Dido, I agree, Laurie Lee was a wonderful writer. There is such lovely nostalgia in As I walked out one Midsummer Morning and Cider with Rosie.

Another writer who makes me want to jump into a time machine is Patrick Leigh Fermor. His descriptions of Europe in the inter-war era are quite lovely. I only wish he had finished the story of his walk to Istanbul but the third book about that journey never got written.

I agree that Britain was my primary destination. We lived in Wales for 10 months, but sadly it was before I had read Here Be Dragons, so I didn't appreciate it as much as I might have. But I did love going to York and walking around London and seeing so many places I had read about.
Frieda is right about Australia - most people who don't live here have no idea how large our country is. If you put a map of Oz over Europe, it pretty much covers it up to Russia. And unlike the US, there aren't many towns in between the large cities.

My list is too long to write but for me as well it was England the first time. I'm sure it's because we read English literature when we are young and it makes a powerful impression on us.

I don't agree with the person who said old England is gone. Several years ago, I traveled in Yorkshire and it was beyond words. The only tourists were English and there were not many of them. The Dales, the Bronte house, the North York Moors National Park, Whitby and St Hilda's Abbey. I'm still pinching myself.

I must add that I have visited many places in the US with literary associations and live in the heart of "The Flowering of New England". That is a treat many here can enjoy.

Yes, after reading "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society", I'd love to have visited the Channel Islands after the WW11.

I was a big Nancy Drew /Carolyn Keene fan from ages 10 to 12. One of the books was set in Hawaii. I don't recall the title. I always wanted to visit Hawaii and did take a cruise there in 2005. Only 50 years after I read the book.

In 1965 my husband to be and I stayed two weeks in the Hotel Royal Bretagne at 11bis rue de la Gaîté in Paris. Years after I read in Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs that she'd stayed in this hotel for several months in 1937, commuting from her teaching post in Passy. She describes it as a very decent hotel and it still was in 1965 and also in 2000 when my husband was given a room there purely by chance when he attended a conference. A room then cost much more than the 17 francs we paid and was much improved.

On this same visit we looked at the nearby Hotel Orfila in rue d'Assas where the Swedish author August Strindberg experienced the psychosis he described in his book Inferno.

Another literary place I've actively sought out was Jane Austen's Chawton in Hampshire, on our way from Mottisfont Abbey. We arrived too late to see the inside but the outside loo was open, to our relief. The greatest disappointment was the long detour we made to Little House in the Big Woods near Pepin, Wisconsin, where we had hoped to show our children Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood home. It was a shiny new replica with hardly a tree in sight. 29 years later it looks more weathered in internet photos.

I've wanted to go to England ever since I can remember. I want to see the England/Scotland/Wales of all the books I've read and loved over the years. I also want to travel to New Zealand; it's been a dream of mine for many years, long before LoTR was filmed there, although I want to see those locations too. I read many books set in NZ when I was a teenager and my imagination was captured by the descriptions alone, it became my dream destination. I thought there might be a chance I could travel to England but not NZ. And so far, I haven't made it across either pond yet!