Bob Payne - BobCarriesOn

May 1, 2014May 26, 2015

The most worthwhile souvenir? Old license plates.

While it is true that I own the world’s largest private collection of McDonald’s placemats in foreign languages, I’ve always felt that the only souvenirs worth collecting are conversations with strangers.

More than anything else you can bring back from a journey, conversations in far places help answer the two questions every traveler should ask: How are the people here different from me? How are they the same? When you know the answers, you have begun to help diminish the lack of understanding that is the source of much of the trouble in the world, and perhaps even unlock the mystery of why knock-knock jokes are nearly universal.

I now realize, however, that there is one more souvenir that can prove worthwhile to many returned travelers: the old license plate.

Perhaps with a dent or two in the metal, perhaps with a bit of rust, old license plates are available in the markets of many nations. Seldom costing more than five or ten dollars, and often thrown in for free if you buy a hand-decorated bong pipe or a life-size wooden carving of a horse, they make interesting keepsakes to hang on the wall above a garage or basement workbench in place of the auto parts calendar, featuring scantily clad “sales reps,” that does not seem as appropriate as it once did.

An old license plate’s value, though, goes far beyond it’s worth as an unusual keepsake. For many Americans, what they are really good for is avoiding parking tickets.

In 19 of the U.S. states, license plates are required only on the rear. In those states, you can put whatever you want on the front. Which is why when I lived in Massachusetts my front plate was from Aruba, and now that I live in Arizona it is from the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Originally, I put on the Aruba plate just for the novelty value. But then, after driving down to New York for a few days, I got a parking ticket that I discovered, to my delight, listed the Aruba plate, but made no mention of the Massachusetts one.

I’d parked in front of a church on East 88^th Street (who knew that the fines were double in front of churches?), and had apparently wedged in so tightly that the meter maid couldn’t read the rear plate. So, perhaps in a hurry, perhaps to get to church, she just wrote the ticket on the front plate.

I would have put the experience down to the happy outcome of a freak occurrence, except that a few months later, in Boston, the same thing happened again. I suspected I was on to something, and, over the next few years, by parking as close as possible to the bumper of the car behind me, I saved myself probably a half dozen parking fines.

After a hiatus of a dozen years, from living in New York, which requires plates on the front and back, I recently moved to Arizona, which only makes you have the one in the rear. So when I was in the Virgin Islands a few months ago, while my companions were buying “Don’t bother, I’m not drunk yet – St. Thomas” tee-shirts, I purchased a used license plate that reads: “U.S. Virgin Islands — America’s Caribbean.”

And long after my companions have stopped wondering whatever possessed them to buy their souvenir, I will remember, every time I rip up a ticket and scatter it to the winds, exactly why I came home with mine.

I do admit that attempting to avoid tickets in this manner can have certain drawbacks.

In Arizona, I have noticed, for instance, that every so often, when I back in tight to the car behind me, and then return from whatever errand I have been running, my rear bumper has been banged up by dents that appear to be about the size of the heel of a cowboy boot.

And once, when I still had my Aruba plate, and was returning to Boston from a weekend in Toronto, U.S. Immigrations detained me for hours while they questioned me, in great detail, about what exactly my connection was with Aruba.

Those drawback, though? Let me tell you, they can result in some very collectible conversations with strangers.

April 22, 2014May 25, 2015

Should CNN apologize for story on travel agents?

Female travel agent in front of plane, suitcase, globe

CNN may be considering an apology today after airing a report on the future of travel, complied by the travel-booking site Skyscanner, predicting that by 2024 travel agents will be replaced by virtual devices.

The apology could become necessary after it was revealed, in the course of fact-checking the story, that travel agents had already long ago been replaced by such devices.

“It happened back in 2008, but since people were already doing most of their own booking online, no one noticed the travel agents were gone,” said Bob Payne, Director of the Institute of Overlooked Public Phenomena.

Another reason little was heard about the changeover, Payne said, is that most of the travel agents quickly got better-paying jobs. “With their industry expertise and their special ability for telling people where to go, they were immediately snapped up by the airlines, to answer the complaint lines.”

Payne said a technology that virtual travel agents are already using – one the report mentioned as something still in the future – is facial recognition. “By knowing when someone is telling the truth, it allows agents to book travel based not on where people say they want to go, but where they’d really rather be.”

It’s one of the reasons, Payne said, that we are seeing such an increase in bookings to Disney World by CNN personnel.

When not working on behalf of the Institute of Overlooked Public Phenomena, travel humor writer Bob Payne is the editor in chief of BobCarriesOn.com, which has been sharing accurate travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth Rock.

October 31, 2013May 1, 2014

Hotel desperate to have guests complain about ghosts

Recognizing that a reputation for being haunted can be good for a hotel’s business, the manager of an aging resort in the Great Smoky Mountains is making every effort to get guests to complain about ghosts.

Bob Payne, who has been running the Shady Indian Resort, just outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for more than 20 years, said that knowing the financial bonanza hotels such as The Crescent, in the Ozarks, and The Stanley, in Colorado, have made from their resident spirits he thought it could be worthwhile to scare up a ghost or two for his own property.

But getting people to believe in ghosts, and, more to the point, complain about them loudly enough to garner national, or even regional, press, has turned out to be much harder than Payne anticipated.

“Doors that seem to open and close on their own, unexplained cold blasts of air in the hallways, skeletons in the closet – I’ve tried to blame it all on paranormal activity,” Payne said. “But guests just assume it’s the result of poor maintenance.”

Payne said it was particularly hard because in all his years at the Shady Indian the only violent death he could recall was when he accidentally checked a family with a small cat into a room already occupied by a circus performer who was traveling with his pet boa constrictor.

“And without a death worthy of a headline it’s really hard to conjure up any kind of story about an apparition,” Payne said.

He said he did think he had a winner one night when guests began complaining about shrieks and moans coming from what appeared to be an empty room. “But it just turned out to be a honeymoon couple who had somehow managed to get themselves under the bed.”

With Halloween upon him, Payne said he would give the haunted approach one more try, perhaps by having the maids draw images in soap on the bathroom mirrors of the contents of guests’ luggage. If that didn’t work, he said, he would go back to claiming “Washington Slept Here.”

October 21, 2013April 22, 2014

Report finds animals in national parks prone to nervous eating during government shutdown

A study just released by the U.S. National Park Service has found that while most aspects of life in our national parks are back to normal following the recent government shutdown one exception has been the effect on park wildlife, as many animals are now overweight as a result of nervous eating during the days the parks were closed.

“The uncertainty brought about by the shutdown caused general stress, relationship conflicts, and fears of unemployment among virtually all park animals, many of whom reacted, as we all often do in such situations, by overeating,” said Bob Payne, a quality of life activist for national park wildlife (except mosquitos).

Payne said that unhealthy calorie intake had been especially pronounced among the parks’ larger carnivores who, more as a distraction than because they were really hungry, routinely preyed on tourists who had entered the parks illegally.

“The French and the Germans were a particular problem,” said Payne. “It got so bad we had to run ads in the European press, warning visitors to our parks of the harm that an unnatural diet could cause the animals.”

Payne said the situation was slowly returning to normal, with many of the large carnivores now back to exercising portion control and eating only healthy snacks, primarily consisting of West Coast and Asian visitors.

“Thank goodness the government shutdown lasted only as long as it did,” Payne said. “Otherwise we would have had to start getting the park animals signed up so that they could take advantage of the Affordable Care Act. And the stress of that would have had its own health repercussions.”

When not working on behalf of national park animals travel humor writer Bob Payne is the editor in chief of BobCarriesOn.com, which has been sharing accurate travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth Rock.

September 3, 2013May 15, 2014

Airlines face sombrero crisis

A recent study confirms what the airlines and the flying public has long suspected. More than 70 percent of sombreros brought aboard aircraft are left behind by people pretending to forget them.

“The explanation is simple,” says Bob Payne, spokesman for the National Association of Airlines Against the Abusive Use of Overhead Bin Space. “Owning a souvenir sombrero, especially if its purchase in some way involved margaritas, always seems like a much better idea when you are actually in Mexico than it does on the flight home.”

The result, says Payne, is not only that aircraft cleaning crews are having to spend considerable time removing the hats but the storage problem created for airline lost and found departments is reaching crisis proportions.

“They haven’t seen anything like it since 2008 when they were inundated with Obama bobble head dolls,” Payne said.

One possible solution to the sombrero crisis, Payne said, would be to have TSA agents wear the cast-off headgear, thus making airport security screening a more welcoming, festive experience, especially if it were possible to get drug-sniffing dogs involved in wearing the hats, too.

Another solution, more popular with the airlines, would be to charge a fee of $25 for the first sombrero brought onboard, and $350 for the second. “The beauty of the latter plan,” Payne said, “Is that it would sober up most of the offending passengers long before they got to their seats.”

Bob Payne is the editor in chief and occasionally fact checker for BobCarriesOn.com.

September 2, 2013April 22, 2014

Fewer children “accidentally” left beside highway this Labor Day

In a clear sign that the economy is on the upswing, AAA reports that fewer children have been “accidentally” left beside the highway during family auto trips this Labor Day weekend than for any other similar period since 2008.

AAA attributes the downturn to increased consumer confidence across all financial sectors, particularly in the area of savings for college tuition, and the fact that siblings are more likely to report the absence of a child from a car during a family auto trip than they are during tough economic times. Some observers, though, argue that another factor is in play, too.

“Children have wised up considerably in recent years, so that few are still being taken in by the parental ruse of sending their offspring to a highway rest stop snack bar with a dollar and a green light to buy whatever they want, and then ‘accidentally’ speeding away,” say Bob Payne, spokesman for the National Organization of Children Who Might Actually Be Better 0ff Without Parents.

Payne said that on a family auto trip most children are still more than willing to go to a highway rest stop snack bar on their own, but not without enough funds to cover a stay at the nearest hotel with a pool for at least through the first month of school.

In related news, another just-released AAA report has found that children who are forced to play the license plate game on family auto trips are 50 percent more likely than other children to move to Hawaii when they grow up.

In addition to his responsibilities as a spokesman for AAA, Bob Payne is the Editor in Chief of BobCarriesOn.com, the website that has been sharing accurate travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth Rock.