Title: There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure
Author: Edited by Doug Lansky
Publisher: Traveler’s Tales, Inc., San Francisco, CA
Copyright Date: 1998
ISBN: 1-885211-27-9
Hard/Soft Cover: Soft Cover
Reviewed By: Yackman
Yackman’s Rating: 7 out of 10
My Review: This is a great book to take on a multi-day paddling trip. It consists of twenty-eight short stories about travel misadventures by authors like Dave Barry, Bill Bryson and many others. The stories are just long enough to fill that space between crawling into the sleeping bag and lights out, and the book is small enough to pack easily (I know this seems like a silly concern, but I have tried to pack oversized, thick books on trips and they are always problematic. And e-books are only a solution if you can keep them dry and have access to a power source.)
What is funny to me may not be funny to you. So, as with all humor writing, you will find some offerings hilarious and others sort of ho-hum. For instance I found the first offering, a story called “Nudity is a State of Mind” by Alan Zwieble, FD/LOL (text talk for “Falling Down, Laughing Out Loud”). Another called “Deep Fried Potato Bug” by Richard Sterling was equally funny with an added “eeeeou, gross” factor in it. And for any parent who has made the pilgrimage to Disney World, Caryl Rivers story, “Dragging the Family to the Magic Kingdom” will really hit home. A few others were not so funny or interesting to me (I won’t color your thinking on these by naming them).
All in all, this is a book worth reading. It’s not deep or thought provoking. It is a light, fun read.
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