"When you travel, things go wrong." That might not sound like uplifting advice, but in this hilarious collection of stories about mishaps in faraway places, award-winning humorist Dave Fox proves otherwise.
I really enjoyed this book and found myself giggling more than a few times at the author's misadventures. Neat to find out that Dave Fox graduated from my state's Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison. Badger Proud!
As a professional tour guide, Dave Fox’s travel philosophy (articulated on page 7) is “When you travel, things go wrong.” Not that he necessarily thinks that this is a bad thing...on the contrary, it is often exactly when things go wrong during a trip that we learn the most about the places we visit. And the entire point of traveling is to learn about other places and other people.
This book is a memoir of the author’s earliest travel experiences, which helped lead him on the path that ended with him embracing travel as a profession. Fox is almost as neurotic as Bill Bryson, and writes with a similar, ironic sense of humor. There are many places that caused me to laugh out loud, especially when he puts the Pink Floyd lyrics “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” into the context of an English grammar school from the viewpoint of a student more familiar with American schools.
The events described in this book do seem to support his thesis that things do go wrong when you travel, but they also show how that can, in the end, become a good thing to a traveler willing to embrace the experience. It certainly makes me want to read more about his travel experiences, and possibly even employ his services as a tour guide. One thing’s for sure, traveling with him isn’t likely to be boring!