Katharine’s Remarkable Road Trip
In the fall of 1907, 77-year-old Katharine heads out in her new car, traveling from Newport, Rhode Island, to Jackson, New Hampshire. She tells her sister that the 270-mile drive is a routine visit to her second home and a chance to catch up with some old friends, but deep down, Katharine knows this may be her final journey.
Rather than dwell on her mortality, she maintains her lifelong strategy of meeting things head-on and views the trip as an adventure, one of many in her eventful life. During her seven-day excursion, she plans for several stops to reconnect with friends and tie up some loose ends but finds herself in a series of unexpected situations and detours. She meets a cast of colorful characters, offering them sage advice and even saving a couple of lives.
Basing her novel on Katharine Prescott Wormeley’s unconventional life, Gail Ward Olmsted has a wealth of material to draw upon. Katharine inherited money from her parents and could have lived a life of leisure, but instead became a volunteer nurse in the Civil War, a hospital administrator, a successful translator of French literature, and a philanthropist. Putting the character on a fictional road trip provides the perfect device to explore her extraordinary experiences as she tells bits of her story to those she meets along the way and reminisces with friends.
Katharine is a little prim and proper but is also warm and charming, and the reader quickly gets swept up in her tales. This book is an inspiring story of a life well lived, which might motivate the reader to take a road trip of their own.
