Travels With Hafa

This book is about the fantastic adventures of Nathan and his dog Rafael, or Hafa, packing up and driving an RV through the Pacific Northwest. As Nathan takes the reader through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon, the experiences are one-of-a-kind. Hafa, Nathan’s German Shepherd pup, is so excited to be on the trip as well as the author describes him learning what it’s like to be able to play off-leash and sniff and poke at whatever he pleases. For the first part of the journey, Nathan’s older brother Aaron comes along. It was a great way to start the trip. During the trip, Nathan goes to Bozeman, Montana to meet his friend Nic and his wife and their three-month-old baby. I really enjoyed Nathan’s narrative of the scenery and everything that he was going through during the trip. From driving the RV through a snowstorm to forgetting a towel almost every time he showered to meeting a girl on the way whom he spent some real quality time with. It was everything I had hoped for in tagging along on his fantastic voyage.

The whole book was written extremely well, which is probably what we should expect from a contributing writer for Forbes. I loved every part of it up until the part it seems to get a bit dark. Around page two hundred or so, Nathan seems to get in a political tizzy as he is headed on his way back home. I don’t know if it was because he didn’t want to go back home to his everyday life or if he always gets triggered while listening to NPR. Whatever it is, he starts ranting about the presidential impeachment and how “showing both sides of a news story is a contrived habit of our media to feign credibility” and ends it with saying “Americans elected a con man.” Now, here’s the thing: I have no problem with the author stating his opinion, but this particular part of the book was clearly the author going off on a tangent. The book is about a man, his dog, and his beautiful trek across the Pacific Northwest and their adventures. If I wanted to read about a political opinion I would have opened up my Facebook app. Can we get back to the best burgers and huckleberry milkshakes already?

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. There were some funny things that happened along the way, some exciting things, some unexpected things, some scary things, and some super chill things. It would be great to see some pictures of the trip, especially of Hafa having the time of his life. I would recommend this book to anyone who might be interested in taking an RV trip since there are many great suggestions in the book as to how hard or how easy it is to do.