Robert Louis Stevenson was not only a gifted writer; he was also an indefatigable traveller. His thirst for adventure was formed by his boyhood visits to remote Scottish lighthouses, & he spent much of his life fleeing the rigours of cold climes & social orthodoxy. Along the way he travelled through the Cevennes with a donkey, booked passage to & across America, & finally famously settled in Samoa in the South Pacific. The canoeing trip through Belgium & northern France that Stevenson describes in An Inland Voyage was taken in 1876, when the author was 26 years old. Stevenson & his companion, Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, each had a kayak A-style wooden canoe, with a deck & rigged with a sail. Starting in Belgium & then travelling downriver in France from Maubeuge (near Mons) to Pontoise on the outskirts of Paris, the book paints a charming picture of Western Europe at a more innocent time.