The Amber Trail

The name and the premise if the book are the Amber Trail - a theoretical historic route for the transportation of amber from the Baltic Sea to the Aegean Sea. Unfortunately, the author got distracted from this, having thrown in a few pages near the beginning of the book about amber, it soon gets little more than a passing mention as she progresses through Poland and Czechoslovakia and into Hungary.

As a bicycle travel book, it also loses its way, as the author and her husband too often abandon their own cycle power for a train to cut 200km out of their trip here and there.

Right at the end of the book the author even states (P189):
I had almost forgotten about our amber trail, so much had happened to divert my attention from it over past weeks.
After which we were told about amber being favoured in Minoan culture in Crete from 2600-2000BC.

If treated as a basic travelogue, there is some general information on history and culture. There are some historic sites visited, there is discussion of politics and peoples (especially around the imminent split of Czechoslovakia, and the split of Yugoslavia, at the time of the book itself involved in an internal war), and there was the authors exploration of her own history and her relationship with her husband, whom she had only recently married.

For me, the book didn't reach the potential that it could, or should have. There are (probably) better books on amber, there are better books on history and the politics of Eastern Europe, there are better books on cycle expeditioning. There wasn't enough of any of these things in this book to rate it better than 2.5 stars, rounded down.