By Kathryn Reed

So much of life is about the journey and not the destination.

Sometimes escaping the routine of our daily lives for an extended period of time helps bring clarity to the meaning of that journey. It did for Suzanne Roberts.

“Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail” is more than a memoir of Roberts’ experience on this famous path through the Sierra. It is more than the story of what it’s like to spend a month hiking the 211-mile trail.

While she was a recent college graduate when she did the hike and now she is a college instructor, Roberts’ reflections on this time in her life is in some ways like a coming of age book.

Undoubtedly men and women will each get something different out of this book. People will relate to it in their own way. But it’s hard to imagine anyone describing it as just a hiking book. It is so much more.

Maybe being of a similar age, of having spent time a year after college on a solo backpacking trip in Europe it made me have a profound connection to this book – really, to the journey. Sometimes we have to prove things to ourselves and we don’t know what those things are or why.

With this book, Roberts, who teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College and Sierra Nevada College, has expanded her classroom to teach us all about the power of women, the sense of accomplishment in pushing oneself beyond her comfort zone and the realities of being immersed in nature day after day.

“Almost Somewhere” – it’s a 260-page journey that is bound to take you beyond the John Muir Trail.