Silvia Otte
Book It: A sunflower field in Gascony, the setting for the Hours’ literary tour ‘Madame Bovary’s France’...

By Anna Kuchment
Oct. 22, 2007 issue

Last summer Bill Busse, a retired architect from Palo Alto, Calif., took a trip down the Mississippi River and through the pages of his favorite childhood stories. In the Mark Twain Mississippi River Tour (from $5,495; literarytraveler.com), Busse, his wife, Barbara, and a dozen other travelers stayed aboard a 1920s paddlewheel steamboat, heard lectures about Mark Twain and his work and visited Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Mo. The highlight: walking through the cave where Twain set some of Tom Sawyer’s and Becky Thatcher’s exploits in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “I’m not sure that people realize this was a real place,” says Busse. “It just grabbed me.”

Though trips like Mark Twain’s Mississippi appeal to all age groups, their popularity has grown as baby boomers approach their empty-nest years. “Baby boomers are a very well-read group and they travel quite a bit,” says Cathy Keefe, spokeswoman for the Travel Industry Association. A 2006 TIA survey showed that 56 percent of adults were interested in enrichment, or educational, trips. “As kids, we ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ but then we get busy with our lives and put those questions away,” says Ann Kirkland, founder of Classical Pursuits (classical pursuits.com) in Toronto. “But there comes a time when we have a little more space for reflection and we go back to those questions.”