Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (3 page)

ME
: I need to go to Tampa on Thursday.

RAMONA
(checking her computer):
No, not Thursday.

ME
: No?

RAMONA
: No, because there’s a $600 penalty if you fly on a Thursday during a month whose name contains two or more vowels following two straight quarters of increased unemployment
unless
you are a joint taxpayer filing singly with two or more men on base
provided
that you spend at least one Saturday night in a hotel room within twelve
feet of a malfunctioning ice machine
and
you undergo a ritual initiation ceremony wherein airline ticket agents dance around you and put honey-roasted peanuts up your nose.

ME
: Book me on the Singapore flight.

Renting a car offers many attractive advantages to the traveler: independence, convenience, dependability, and a sudden, massive lowering of the IQ. I know what I’m talking about here. I live in Miami, and every winter we have a huge infestation of rental-car drivers, who come down here seeking warm weather and the opportunity to make sudden left turns without signaling across six lanes of traffic into convenience stores.
⁸
My wife and I have affectionately nicknamed these people “Alamos,” because so many of them seem to rent their cars from Alamo, which evidently requires that every driver leave several major brain lobes as a deposit. We’ll be driving along, and the driver in front of us will engage in some maneuver that is boneheaded even by the standard of Miami (official motoring motto: “Death Before Yielding”), and we’ll shout, “Look out! Alamos!” We’re tempted to stay off the highways altogether during tourist season, just stockpile
food and spend the entire winter huddled in our bedrooms, but we’re not sure we’d be safe
there
.

Not that I feel superior to the Alamos. I’ve rented many cars myself, and I have to admit that as soon as I get behind the wheel, I go into Bozo Mode. For one thing, I am instantly lost, and the only guidance I have is the rental-car-agency map, the sole function of which apparently is to show you the location of the rental-car agency. So I’m disoriented, plus I’m constantly trying to adjust the mirrors, seat, air-conditioning, steering wheel, etc., plus—this is the most important part—I have to find a good radio station. This means I am devoting only about 2 percent of my brain to actually driving the car. And thus I—a person who tends to be
extremely
critical of other people’s driving—am transformed into an Alamo, drifting along at 27 miles per hour in the left lane of the interstate, with my left blinker on, trying to locate the FM button. Maybe, as a warning to other drivers, the federal government should require that all rental cars must have giant orange question marks sticking up out of the their roofs.

The car-rental industry is extremely competitive, and often you can find some really good
“deals” by keeping your eyes “peeled” for advertisements that look like this:

As a “smart shopper,” you will definitely save “big money” by taking advantage of bargains such as these, although you should of course insist that the agency person explain the terms of the rental agreement before you sign it:

YOU
: What does this mean?

AGENCY PERSON
: What does what mean?

YOU
: This part here, where it says, “Renter agrees that we get to keep his house.”

AGENCY PERSON
: Oh,
that
. Nothing.

YOU
(relieved):
Whew.

The type of luggage you carry says a lot about you. For example, if you’re carrying somebody
else’s
luggage, it says you’re a thief.

No, seriously, luggage is important, which is why most frequent travelers spend their entire lives looking for Exactly the Right Piece of Luggage, the one that is nice and compact but holds a lot of stuff. This is a waste of time, of course, because the truth is that a piece of luggage is nothing but a bag or a box with a handle on it, and under the laws of physics, which are strictly enforced in luggage, the size of the bag or the box determines how much it will hold, as can be seen in the following chart:

The infrequent traveler generally accepts these limitations and purchases one of those enormous, hard-sided suitcases that have wheels and
weigh about 87 pounds even when they’re empty. But your frequent traveler never abandons the quest to find a miracle luggage unit that can hold more than it can actually hold. Over the course of a lifetime the frequent traveler will purchase dozens of luggage units, frequently from advertisements in airline in-flight magazines. You’ve probably seen the advertisements. There’s a picture of what appears to be an ordinary carry-on suitcase, underneath which are about 70,000 words, which begin:

A recent scientific discovery by researchers at the Stanford University School of Luggage Science has made possible the REVOLUTIONARY new Laser 3000X Total Carry-on Wardrobe Unit! Although smaller than a standard clarinet case, this incredible unit, thanks to advanced luggage technology, can easily hold:

• Eight men’s suits OR
  

• 14 women’s full-length evening gowns PLUS
  

• All the shirts, socks, ties, underwear, and clothing accessories you would need for two terms in Congress PLUS
  

• All your toiletries PLUS
  

• An actual working toilet
  

And that’s not all! How many times have you said to yourself, as a busy business traveler:

And so on. Ordinarily you would take one look at this kind of advertisement and say, hey, get
serious
. But in the airplane environment, where you have nothing else to do except watch the movie,
¹⁰
you find yourself reading all the way through it, and by the time you’re on your third Bloody Mary, and you’ve reached the part where the advertisement claims that this suitcase will do your tax returns for you, you’re thinking, “Hey! This could be the answer to my luggage needs!” So you whip out your Visa or MasterCard and fill out the order form, and six to ten weeks later you receive: a bag with a handle. A
small
bag with a handle. Which, if you really pack it right, will hold two pairs of socks PLUS your dental floss. I know what I’m talking about! I have seventeen of these things!

Federal Airline Administration regulations state that each passenger may have up to 17,000 pounds
of carry-on luggage
provided that he or she can jam it all into the overhead baggage compartment
. I am a veteran traveler, but I am still amazed at how much stuff some people will try to get up there. Entire households, sometimes. These people are always directly in front of me.

“What do you mean, I can’t carry this on?!” they’ll say to the airline personnel. “I ALWAYS carry this on!”

“Sir,” the airline personnel will say, “that’s a
lawn tractor.”

“But look!” the person will say. “It fits in the overhead baggage compartment!”

And the person will actually attempt to shove it in there, which is of course impossible because (a) the tractor is too large, and (b) the compartment already contains some other passenger’s upright piano. But this will not stop the person from trying. No human emotion is more powerful than the grim determination of an airline passenger attempting to shove an inappropriate object into the overhead baggage compartment.

There are two major schools of thought on how to pack for traveling. These are known technically as “my school” and “my wife’s school.”

My school of packing is that you should never carry more things than you can fit into a standard sandwich bag. This way you never put yourself
in a position where you have to turn your belongings over to a commercial airline’s crack Luggage Hiding Department (traces of airline luggage have been found on Mars). So I travel very light, and I’ve found that this is really not a problem, once I get adjusted to the stench resulting from wearing the same shirts and socks and, of course, underwear for as long as two weeks running. The advantage of this is that I get plenty of room to stretch out on airplanes, because nobody will sit near me. The disadvantage is that the flight attendants also stay away, preferring to serve my dinner entree by flipping it at me Frisbee-style from as far as 25 feet away, and some of those airline entrees
¹¹
are hard enough to kill a person.

My wife, on the other hand, would not think of leaving the house for even a half hour without sufficient possessions in her purse alone to establish a comfortable wilderness homestead. So when we travel, she packs many, many items. She buys these giant suitcases, manufactured by shipbuilders, and she packs them with items for every conceivable contingency. Like, if we’re going someplace in the tropics, she’ll naturally pack an entire set of lightweight outfits, but she’ll also pack an entire set of
medium-weight
outfits, in case we have a cool snap; and a set of
heavy
outfits, in case we get locked inside a meat freezer; and a
waffle
iron, in case we get hungry for waffles while we’re in there; and so on. So we
generally arrive at the airport with virtually all of our worldly possessions, looking like Cambodian refugees, except that we appear to be actually taking Cambodia with us. Our carry-on luggage alone is enough to prevent many planes from ever leaving the ground. They’ll taxi down the runway, gaining speed, then, after a violent grunting effort to take off, they’ll continue right on taxiing, sometimes right into a harbor. This doesn’t worry us, however, because my wife always brings plenty of scuba equipment.

How to Speak a Foreign Language in Just
30
Minutes

O
ne of the great things about being an American, aside from the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to have obscene bumper stickers, is that so many foreign people speak our language.
¹
You can walk the streets of just about any major city in the world, and as soon as the natives realize that you’re an American, they’ll make you feel right at home.

“Stick them up!” they’ll say. “Please to be handing over your American Express traveler’s checks! Don’t leave home without them!”