I Really Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Journeys from Harare to Eternity (Travel Literature Series)
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I Really Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Journeys from Harare to Eternity (Travel Literature Series)

I Really Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Journeys from Harare to Eternity (Travel Literature Series)
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I Really Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Journeys from Harare to Eternity (Travel Literature Series)

by (Editor: Roger Rapoport) (Editor: Bob Drews)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: RDR Books (2001-05)
ISBN: 1571430814
EAN: 9781571430816
Dewy Decimal #: 910
Paperback: 294 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: BX033-061212006
Condition: Used: Like New
Comments: Clean and shiny. Like new. No remainder mark.


Editorial Reviews


Product Description
The trip of a lifetime, or a life sentence?

Disasters that can't wait to happen are guaranteed to make you unfasten your seatbelt for the belly laugh of the travel season. As you try to figure out why your wallet just disappeared, relax and be glad you weren't along for the ride with...

Marius Bosc as the entire waitstaff of a New York restaurant began attacking him after he tried to send back his lo mein.

Claudia Capos as she sat down to a splendid anteater served for a Tasmanian Thanksgiving.

Brooke Comer hitching a ride through Upper Egypt on top of a pickup bed full of unripe melons.

Matthew FIke when a coed in one of his English classes in Bulgaria announced "I need to be with you in your bed."

Nadine Payne when she was kicked off Romania's "Orient Distress" on a rail line in the middle of nowhere.

Cameron Burns on his honeymoon as his wife discovered a poisonous eight-inch long scorpion crawling down her blue cotton t-shirt. Zona Sage as she and a flight crew worked feverishly to track down a putrid smell that makes a jet's interior smell like a sewer.

Larry Parker as a stream of overnight freight trains rolled past the window of his Oregon bed and breakfast.

Carole Dickerson shipwrecked with her family on a dream vacation.

William Douglass as monkeys danced about his Kenya lodge room in his wife Jan's nightgown.

A welcome addition to the literature of the damned, this book rolls up the welcome mat as it makes you rethink those vacation plans. Yes, in this outragenously funny anthology of vacation horror stories you'll spend one too many nights in Tunisia and flee nightmarish holidays that stretch from Harare to Eternity.


Customer Reviews


Pretty dull
Rating (2)
Date: 2002-05-21

5 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful


This book is a third sequel to a book of established writers' travel horror stories. Here, amateur writers share their travel woes. It is, clearly, an attempt to milk a cash cow. While the writing is adequate (certainly not great), it's the content of the stories that really makes this a useless anthology. They're the quality of story you might tell your friends at dinner, but are in no way deserving of publication. Examples include: I was on a plane that was delayed; I couldn't find my car after the Super Bowl; we rented a boat and wrecked it; the service at this restaurant in England was very slow; we went to a hotel and damned if it wasn't a fairly shabby hotel; we ate some food and got sick. There are a few stories as interesting as, say, getting hurt and experiencing Vietnam's standard of hospital care. But mostly this is very dull, and pretty close to worthless.


Better still, don't even get out of bed
Rating (4)
Date: 2002-03-27

7 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful


The principal attraction of I REALLY SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME is that its collected tales of road woe happen in non-exotic places to Ordinary Joes. I've been entertained in the past by compilations of such stories, some of which might perhaps stretch the credulity of those whose idea of a journey is flying to Phoenix to visit the mother-in-law or, at best, spending a couple of weeks on a package cruise of the Med. You know the kind of stories I mean: road warrior loses laptop to headhunters in the Amazon outback, spelunker falls into pit of bat guano in a remote Siberian cave. I mean, whom do you know does this stuff?

In this book, whether it's being seated on an international flight in front of someone secretly carrying an eye-wateringly stinky package - durian, in this case - or stupidly parking the car on the tram tracks in Brussels and bringing city traffic to a complete halt, I can relate without too much a stretch of the imagination. Then there's the story by the man whose experiences in a provincial Vietnamese hospital having sea urchin spines removed from his foot remind one of medieval torture. Or the one about having to chaperone "Ugly Californian" relatives through the backwaters of Central Europe. The first chapter relating a couple's encounters with various creepy-crawlers, including a scorpion found in a hanging shirt, during a trip to Costa Rica is particularly relevant to me because my wife wants to visit the country. (Oh, sweetie, come and read this!)

I won't pretend that all of these 43 stories are terrific. The monodrone - not a proper word, but it ought to be - by the college professor congratulating himself on having resisted the persistent sexual advances of a female student enrolled at the American University of Bulgaria was a piece of self-serving claptrap. And the one by the adventurer who decides to dribble a soccer ball across 15 miles of Colorado wilderness was simply contrived and silly. And a few more were just so-so. However, after finishing each chapter, I looked forward to the next with expectant curiosity and was rarely disappointed...

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