Tag: travel companions

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16 of the World’s Worst Travel Companions

Hannibal crossing Alps with elephants

 

 

Have you ever discovered, as the flight attendants are checking seatbelts one last time before departure, that you will be spending the next five hours sitting next to someone who is convinced you want to know how a barometer works? Don’t complain. Here are a few travel companions who have proven far more annoying.

Hannibal — Laid-back pets can ease a traveler’s anxieties. But an emotional support elephant?

Timothy Leary — Only wants to travel in the high season.

Christopher Columbus — Terrible sense of direction.

DB Cooper — Always trying to skip out on the tab.

Santa Claus — A Jolly companion, but insists on pushing through the night, even if it’s foggy out.

Ancient Mariner — Once, no horizon was too far, but now he is only interested in the distance to the next restroom.

Dorothy — Just because you are not in Kansas anymore is no reason to act like a college student on spring break.

Huckleberry Finn — For the length of the Mississippi, he talks about how next time he is doing it on a cruise ship.

Captain Kirk — If you insist on somebody beaming you up at the first sign of discomfort, you are not a traveler but a tourist.

Johnny Cash — Maybe you’ve been everywhere, man. But checking Reno, Chicago, Fargo, and Wichita off your bucket list is not how you get to know places.

Marco Polo — Travels all the way to China and learns nothing except for a game that kids play in the swimming pool.

Peter Minuet — It’s bad enough to brag about driving a hard bargain with starving souvenir sellers. But $24 for Manhattan is criminal.

Jack Kerouac — After days of riding across America with the author of On the Road, a young wanderer of the 1950’s might be forgiven for lamenting that it was not yet possible to call for an Uber.

Robinson Crusoe — He talks on and on about adventures with his companion, Friday. But in truth he is only a weekend traveler.

Sir Edmund Hillary — You’d think that at least once in a while he’d make base camp at a beach resort.

Freddy Kruger — If only he just wouldn’t compare everywhere in the world to Elm Street.

 

Travel humor writer Bob Payne travels only with imaginary friends. 

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Travel bug?  Find out how bad you have it.

The travel bug will take you to Kaieteur Falls in Guyana.

Ever wondered how seriously you are afflicted with the travel bug?  Although there is no grading,  this  test will make the answer very clear.

You met your spouse:

    1. In grade school.
    2. During Happy Hour at Applebee’s
    3. While being held hostage by the Taliban.

You lost your virginity at:

    1. Seventeen.
    2. A fraternity party.
    3. 30,000 feet.

You have considered converting all your assets to:

  1. Gold
  2. Bit coin.
  3. Frequent flyer miles.

The first words you learn in any language are:

  1. Hello
  2. Thank you.
  3. I’d like a  room farther from the gunfire.

You would be least willing to give up your:

  1. Money.
  2. Life.
  3. Passport.

The place you’ve lived longest is:

  1. The town where you were born.
  2. The town you settled in after college.
  3. Chicago O’Hare, Terminal 5.

You’d never rent a car:

  1. Without getting collision coverage.
  2. In Afghanistan.
  3. You couldn’t sleep in.

Trusting your gut is:

  1. Almost always the right decision.
  2. Usually safer than trusting your government’s Travel Advisories.
  3. A mistake you’ve made in restaurants that cater to backpackers.

Your favorite souvenirs are:

  1. T-shirts.
  2. Refrigerator magnets.
  3. Conversations with strangers.

You always carry:

  1. A spare tube of moisturizer.
  2. About 5 extra pounds, 10 if a buffet is offered.
  3. A list of countries that have no extradition treaty with your own.

The bills and coins tucked away in your underwear drawer add up to:

  1. A tidy nest egg.
  2. Evidence.
  3. A total of $2.34 in 17 currencies.

You would like your obituary to say you died:

  1. In your sleep.
  2. Surrounded by a loving family.
  3. Aboard a flight that went down between Tahiti and Bora Bora.

Your favorite travel companions:

  1. Always pay their fair share.
  2. Don’t mind taking the middle seat.
  3. Are imaginary.

Your most memorable experience at a tropical beach resort involved a:

  1. Romantic interlude.
  2. Luxury spa.
  3. Tsunami warning.

You immediately recognized the photo at the top of the blog, which Bobcarrieson.com editor in chief Bob Payne took in 2009, as:

  1. Niagara Falls, New York
  2. Sioux Falls, Iowa
  3. Kaieteur Falls, Guyana

 

 

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Top six reasons to travel with the dead

Camels safari at sunset

 

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.

 

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