Bob Payne - BobCarriesOn

May 26, 2015May 29, 2015

A toddler shares 10 tips for airline travel

Grownups, which according to most toddlers is anyone over ten years old, are often no longer capable of enjoying the pleasures of airline travel. No joy for them in kicking the seat in front of you or seeing how far you can throw a juice box. As a result, grownups have very little to teach toddlers about flying, which may be why the two groups of travelers are often so unsettled around each other. That’s why we are presenting these ten tips for airline travel from an actual toddler, based on a lifetime of experience, which is to say 17 months.

Getting acquainted during boarding

As you make way your way down the aisle, offer a handful of Cheerios and a smile to every seated passenger, making note of those who do no respond, should it later become necessary to vomit on someone.

Choosing a special toy

A special toy can be anything – a wooden truck, an electronic game that beeps, and beeps, and beeps, or a tiny stuffed animal that can snuggle comfortably into a less-than-vigilant passenger’s red wine glass. What’s important is that when you want the toy, preferably while the flight attendants are urging everyone to take their seats, one of your parents has just packed it into a carry-on bag and stowed it in the only available overhead bin, twelve rows back from yours.

Snack selection

Soft snacks are best because if you lose interest before you are finished you can use them for early attempts to write your name on the armrest that would otherwise have been occupied by the lady sitting next to you.

If your father claims he couldn’t get seats together

Accept this for what it is: an indication that he’ll probably be out of your life by the time you are ten. However, if another man who isn’t too stinky is sitting next to your mother, there’s nothing wrong with being proactive by allowing her to pretend she doesn’t know you.

Best time to insist on going potty

Right after the seatbelt sign illuminates is ideal, as this will focus maximum attention on the fact that you know how to use a big-person potty. If you are told that you will have to wait, like big people do, one useful way of passing the time is to see if you can stand up on your tray table.

Visiting with other passengers

The best way to meet people in flight is by tottering down the aisle, from armrest to armrest, as if your walking skills are even less developed than they are. If the aisle is also occupied by the drinks cart this can be very entertaining, except to the flight attendants, who will scold you in a manner they usually reserve for grownups. Stand your ground, though, perhaps gathering courage by reminding yourself you are dealing with someone whose annual starting salary was less than $19,000. If that fails, and you must retreat, do it in as dignified a manner as possible, by observing in a voice that’s calm but capable of carrying for at least six or eight rows, “The flight attendant made a stinky.”

Clothing options

The two clothing options are on and off. Use the latter if other forms of entertainment, such as repeatedly pushing the call button, are losing their appeal, or if during preparations for landing no one is paying you the attention life has given you to expect.

Coping with earaches

As painful as earaches can be, there is often nothing you can do about them, except to find some kind of distraction, such as pulling the hair of the passenger in front of you.

If the captain makes an unscheduled stop to remove your family from the plane

This is a moment you will want to help your parents remember for a long time, making it a perfect opportunity to surreptitiously kick off a shoe.

If a grownup has a breakdown in flight and you are implicated

Smile and offer a handful of Cheerios to all involved.

April 14, 2015May 29, 2015

5 sure signs you are stealing hotel soap

Let’s be honest. Stealing at hotels is widespread. Egregious examples include $60 resort fees, $100 breakfasts, and $1,500-plus junior suites. But putting aside the shortcomings of management, let’s look at a question many hotel guests struggle with: Can taking hotel soap be considered stealing?

Yes it can.

You are stealing hotel soap if:

While a housekeeper’s cart is left unattended in the hallway, you load the cart’s entire supply into an empty suitcase you have brought along just for that purpose.

Noticing that the housekeeper has left another guest’s door ajar while servicing the room, you claim to be that guest, say you just need to duck into the bathroom for a minute, and make off with any toiletries you find. You increase the severity of your crime if, confronted by the room’s bona fide occupants, you claim to be a reviewer for TripAdvisor.

You actually are a hotel reviewer, and while an assistant manager waits patiently on the balcony, hoping you won’t notice the ants crawling up the wall, you strip the bathroom of everything you can fit into your camera bag.

Discovering the same soap in the hotel gift shop, you slip it into your tote bag and walk out without paying because you can’t get over how much they are selling it for.

You are a professional burglar, and are ransacking the room anyway, and take the soap because it comes in an expensive looking wrapper that makes it ideal for re-gifting.

If you do plan to steal hotel soap, the world’s best hotels to steal it from are:

The Hotel Principe di Savoia Milano

Lowest room rate: $353
Soap brand: Acqua di Parma
Soap cost: $35/3.5 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 10
Also worth considering: Recently re-designed by Thierry Despont, the Principe Bar is opulent, and its liquor stock not particularly well guarded.

Burj Al Arab Jumeirah Hotel, Dubai

Lowest room rate: $1,767
Soap brand: Hermes
Soap cost: $16.99/3.5 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 104
Also worth considering: One of the hotel’s chauffer-driven guest Rolls Royces will blend into local traffic for a clean getaway.

Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest

Lowest room rate: $333
Soap brand: L’Occitane
Soap cost: $7/2.6 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 48
Also worth considering: Nespresso coffee machine will fit inconspicuously into all but smallest bags.

Oberoi Udaivilas, Udaipur, India

Lowest room rate: $321
Soap brand: Kama Ayurveda
Soap cost: $10/2.65 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 32
Also worth considering: Chandelier in the lobby is not vintage, but of high quality.

The Langham, Chicago

Lowest room rate: $490
Soap brand: Chua Spa Private Label
Soap cost: $10/3.5 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 49
Also worth considering: Upgrade to the infinity suite and you’ll have the option of making off with the custom-painted grand piano.

The Peninsula Shanghai

Lowest room rate: $403
Soap brand: Oscar de la Renta
Soap cost: $12.90/3.5oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 31
Also worth considering: Artwork on walls at Salon de Ming lounge should prove easy enough to remove.

Big Stock Photo

April 9, 2015April 14, 2015

Top six reasons to travel with the dead

If you hope to learn anything about the world, going solo is by far the best way to travel. But if you must travel with others, I recommend the dead. An incontrovertible fact is that when they travel the dead seldom:

Argue about the hour of departure.

Insist on a window seat

Pout if a restaurant is not of their choosing

Wear board shorts when visiting sacred shrines

Use a calculator app to split the check

Take selfies

Among the dead, writers are favorite traveling companions. Their words are already out there, allowing you to decide in advance if their sensibilities are compatible with your own. But their corporeal selves usually remain conveniently entombed, making them not overly concerned about such issues as who gets the room with the view.

For a ramble through France, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson makes an excellent traveling companion. His Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes, the story of a 12-day walk through southern France in 1878, is largely about the shortcomings of traveling in company. Although in his case the company is his donkey, Modestine, who, frustratingly for Stevenson, is in no more of a hurry to reach their destination than Odysseus had been to reach Ithaca.

The irony is that despite the abuse Stevenson heaps on Modestine for not being focused enough on their goal, Travels With a Donkey contains the declaration that almost more than any other has been used to define the essence of travel:

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

For journeys through the Arab World, there may be no better traveling companion than Freya Stark, although she usually went alone. A constant traveler and prolific writer, her words, even more than Stevenson’s, make you want to walk out the door:

“Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.”

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.”

“I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?”

To really understand Stark, though, the kind of traveler she was, the kind of journeys she would want to take you on, it is necessary only to read these few lines from The Valleys of the Assassins, published in 1936:

“. . . the country seemed to be thick with relatives of people he had killed, and this was a serious drawback to his usefulness as a guide. . .”

A guide to a far stranger land, and possibly someone you should not travel with alive or dead, would be Hunter S. Thompson, whose Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might or might not serve as a traveling companion for a journey of your own. This one little scene should be enough to help you decide:

“There’s a big … machine in the sky, … some kind of electric snake … coming straight at us.”

“Shoot it,” said my attorney.

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to study its habits.”

If you should find yourself traveling with Thompson the most important thing to remember is:

Don’t post selfies.

April 2, 2015April 9, 2015

10 buildings most likely to baffle future archeologists

Some day, when archeologists and other scientists are pulling away the vines and trying to figure out the significance of some of the world’s most mysterious ancient buildings, here are the ten most likely to baffle them.

Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada

Future generations, perhaps informed by the alien race that first created the Egyptian pyramids and later returned to take credit for them, will think they understand what the Luxor Hotel building is: a sanctuary for people who are happy to go without sunlight for a thousand years. But they’ll be as mystified as the aliens as to how it ended up in Las Vegas.

Longaberger Headquarters Building, Newark, Ohio

Scientists will spend untold centuries looking in the wrong place, in what was once known as the U.S. state of New Jersey, in search of evidence of a rumored race of human giants — giants grown so large from protein shakes and energy bars that the earth could no longer sustain them. The scientists will believe they have discovered proof of the elusive beings’ existence, though, in a place once known as Ohio, when they find the almost fully intact remains of a seven-story high picnic basket.

Dog Bark Park Inn, Cottonwood, Idaho

Created as a bed and breakfast accommodation, and described by its chainsaw wielding builder as the World’s Biggest Beagle, the Dog Bark Park Inn may someday be pointed to as a dire warning from the past about the risks of genetically modified pet food.

The Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic

Originally nicknamed the Fred and Ginger House, this current Prague landmark building will look to the uninformed of future generations like a cross between an episode of the ancient classic “Dancing with the Stars” and the melted aftermath of a thermo-nuclear blast. Scholars will shake their heads knowingly, however, in recognition that all has been explained, when they discover that one of the designers was architect Frank Gehry.

Selfridges Department Store, Birmingham, England

This building will be a tough one for future explorers of the past, because not even contemporary observers can find a reasonable explanation for why the scale-covered urban British structure known as Selfridges looks like it does. However, immunologists working only from old photographs may someday suggest that it could have been a giant mutant virus, capable of luring an earlier, more primitive race with the questionable promise of reasonably priced consumer goods.

Agbar Tower, Barcelona, Spain

For most delvers into the mysteries of humankind’s past, what is now known as the Agbar Tower, or Torre Agbar, will be easily recognized, just as statues on Easter Island are today, as a boastfully oversize phallic symbol. Strengthening that assumption will be the discovery of ancient texts describing one of the 473-foot tower’s most striking features, its nocturnal illumination, unfortunately mistranslated as nocturnal emission.

Upside-Down House, Trassenheide, Germany

As all records may soon be archived on electronic databases, followed by several millennia of no electricity, future generations will be unclear as to how the previous epoch of human history ended. Upside-down houses similar to this one, located in a small German seaside resort town, should suggest, though, that it ended badly.

Fish-shaped building, Hyderabad, India

Everyone in times-to-come will easily recognize this four-story piscatorial contrivance as one of many failed attempts to escape earth aboard a spacecraft. Who its specific passengers were meant to be, however, will remain a mystery until someone, probably part of an Indian National Monuments cleaning crew, notices a barely legible inscription at the base of the craft, just behind the anal fin, reading, “So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish Food.”

Aldar headquarters, Abu Dhabi

Archeologists of the 31^st Century will certainly find themselves trying to unravel the mystery of what we know today as the Aldar Headquarters Building, in Abu Dhabi. And while they may be perplexed as to why an earlier society would have felt the need to mint a coin that measured 361-feet in diameter, some as yet unborn historian will easily make a name for him or herself by hypothesizing the oversize piece of change to be representative of the moment in history when pickpocketing ceased to be a viable career path.

The Gate of the Orient, Suzhou, China

Unless procreation, perhaps adjusting to a post-apocalyptic world, goes in a radical new direction over the coming millennia, people will no doubt still understand the meaning of “to get into someone’s pants.” What they won’t understand, as they contemplate the ruins of The Gate of the Orient building, in Suzhou, China, is why the pants had to be 990 feet tall.

May 16, 2014April 9, 2015

When everybody is a comedian, security slows at Las Vegas Airport

Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport has announced it may have to review the effectiveness of the eight new security videos it introduced this week.

The airport security videos, featuring Las Vegas entertainers, some of whom people may have heard of, are meant to show the airport’s many inexperienced travelers how to get through security checkpoints in the shortest time possible.

“Unfortunately, the videos seem to be projecting the wrong message,” said Bob Payne, McCarran’s Assistant Director of Terminal Entertainment.

Payne said the airport security videos were released on Tuesday, highlighting tips by comedians Louie Anderson, Carrot Top, Murray SawChuck, the Blue Man Group, Terry Fator, the cast from “Raiding the Rock Vault,” and a father and son Mafia act, only one of which was carrying a machine gun in his violin case.

“Ever since then,” Payne said, “the airport security lines have slowed dramatically, as passengers insist on talking to TSA agents using hand-puppets, trying to make 5 oz. bottles magically shrink, and attempting to throw their voice so it sounds like people are crying for help from inside the x-ray machine.”

Payne said that just one among many security issues stemming from the videos has been that so many passengers are arriving at the checkpoints dressed from head to toe in blue body paint that the TSA agents, who do have loved ones to go home to, are hesitant to do anywhere near the number of pat-downs they normally would.

“Worst of all,” Payne said, “is that everybody thinks they are a comedian, which wouldn’t be so bad, except that far too many people, as they go through the x-ray machines, are starting their routine with, ‘This one will kill you.’ And when we hear the word kill we have procedures we have to follow, which just slows everything down that much more.”

May 7, 2014July 17, 2015

Former cannibals trying to develop tourism misunderstand “finger food”

An indigenous tribe once known for cannibalism but now trying to join the global mainstream by developing its own tourism product apologized today to a group of travel bloggers for a misunderstanding over the phrase “finger food.”

“They had no intention of causing mental anguish among their guests, and certainly had no idea that something as common in their culture as skewered digits would create such a culinary outcry, ” said a tribe spokesman, adding that according to tribal custom giving somebody the finger is considered a great honor.

The travel bloggers, who were on a press trip, and thus assumed to be less willing than most to criticize a free meal, said that despite their efforts to overcome a feeling of uneasiness, concerns had been growing ever since they received a press kit in which the tribe’s new marketing slogan was revealed to be “Host ‘Em, Toast ‘Em, Roast ‘Em.”

“Still, some of us were already tweeting ‘Finger-licking good,’ when we realized that among the yams, taro, and crayfish there actually were fingers,” said one of the bloggers, Bob Payne, of BobCarriesOn.com, the site that has been offering accurate travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth rock. “It was almost as disgusting as some of the stuff you see on “The Food Network.”

“Well intentioned or not, commenting on the meal would have been too much, even for an online audience,” said Payne. “And of course we had no choice but to cancel the tribe’s dinner offer, which they said would feature “Foot-longs.”

There has been no word on where the finger food originated. But late yesterday it was reported that a tribe in a neighboring village were gathering weapons and flooding the local beauty saloons with requests for face paint, as if in preparation for war.