From Publishers Weekly
With her infallible mix of outspoken humor and compassion, the internationally bestselling author of I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise deflates the bloated claims of travel as pure pleasure. It's bad enough with the kids who order the costliest dish on the menu and eat only the pickle. With her husband, Bombeck finds risky adventures from primitive New Guinea to supposedly civilized countries. The couple endures carping companions on a tour bus in Rome: "They felt the tour was tilted in favor of Catholic churches." Other trials involve the vagaries of renting cars, tipping and, always, finding a working toilet, as problematic in Houston's vaunted Space Center as in the backward places of the world. After scoring direct hits on the funny bone, Bombeck moves readers with stories about elderly and handicapped people who enjoy traveling in their different ways. A blind young boy describing what he "saw" with his other senses while descending the Grand Canyon is one of many persons the author makes unforgettable. 750,000 first printing; $400,000 ad/promo; first serial to Woman's Day; first serial to Woman's Day; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selections. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Bombeck hits the bull's-eye with this wry meditation on the art of surviving one's long-dreamed-of and hard-earned exotic vacations. Huddled in a lumpy bed in Papua New Guinea, listening to a tribal war play itself out in the street outside her hotel room, Bombeck reflects on the privileges earned by a life of hard work, prudent financial management, and a taste for adventure. Over the years, not only have she and her husband (as well as, at the worst of times, her three reluctant adolescent kids) been blessed with the chance to drag 50-pound suitcases from airport terminal to taxi queue to hotel lobby to hotel room and back again (or else, when the luggage is lost in transit, to spend two weeks in Tahiti in three-piece suits), but they have splurged on bus tours that allotted 15 minutes to view the Book of Kells in Ireland and an hour and a half to tour a sweater factory; on a private car whose driver spoke English like an Italian Henry Kissinger with a lip full of Novocain; on a villa in which the staff spoke only Spanish and the guests were reduced to rubbing their tummies at the cook and saying, ``Yummy, yummy!''; and on a glamorous cruise through the fjords of Norway, where Bombeck and spouse ate 17 meals a day and outgrew their clothes, only to find half the crew camped out in the exercise room. Worldly wisdom gained by years of experience with Turkish bathrooms, Montezuma's revenge, and transporting native spears home on American airlines has impressed on Bombeck the basic commonality of all cultures and has inspired her to suggest that instead of stockpiling nuclear weapons we should aim our vacation slides at one another. Classic Bombeck, in which she does away with any notion of an empty-nest syndrome. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for August.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description
Join Erma Bombeck as she travels the world with family in tow. A giddy guided tour of the global village, this is travel writing as only Erma Bombeck could write it. A Publisher's Weekly audio bestseller.A 1991 Grammy Award nominee

About the Author
Erma Bombeck, one of the most popular newspaper columnists in the United States and the author of numerous bestselling books, died in San Francisco on Monday, April 22, 1996 from complications following a kidney transplant earlier in the month.Bombeck had been ill for some time. In 1992, after she underwent a mastectomy, her kidneys failed and she began dialysis at her home in Arizona. She suffered from polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary complaint. Even with her illness, Bombeck continued her weekly schedule of housework, her source for the hilarious columns and books for which she was widely loved."My type of humor is almost pure identification," she once told The New York Times. "A housewife reads my columns and says, 'But that's happened to me! I know just what she's talking about!'"If I didn't do my own housework, then I have no business writing about it. I spend 90 percent of my time living scripts and 10 percent writing them."Erma Bombeck's books include Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, which spent an entire year in the Number One spot on The New York Times bestseller list; Family: The Ties That Bind...and Gag!; If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?; I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise; When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home, which was a New York Times bestseller and the sixth biggest selling nonfiction book of 1991; and A Marriage Made in Heaven...Or Too Tired for an Affair.There are over twenty million copies of Erma shelved, and her thrice-weekly syndicated columns reached an estimated thirty million readers every week.Bombeck was a regular on ABC-TV's Good Morning America for eleven years. She holds fifteen honorary doctorates, has been named to the list of the 25 Most Influential Women in America by the World Almanac since 1979, and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the President's Advisory Committee for Women when it was formed in 1978.She is survived by her husband, William Bombeck, her mother, Erma Harris, and her three children.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Erma Bombeck is at her hilarious best in this tour de force of laughs! With honesty and insight, she offers tips and truisms all travelers can appreciate: Beware of food that is described as, "Some Americans say it tastes like chicken." If you are in Germany, the bus driver will be Asian. If you are in Spain, the driver will be Russian. If you are touring France with a French driver, you are on the wrong bus. Plumbing is the key to world power. It's time to go home when someone tells you an icon is over two million years old, is only steps from the bus, and you yawn and say, "Describe it to me."

Wherever Erma travels, you'll enjoy the trip led by America's best-loved humorist.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Bombeck hits the bull's-eye with this wry meditation on the art of surviving one's long-dreamed-of and hard-earned exotic vacations. Huddled in a lumpy bed in Papua New Guinea, listening to a tribal war play itself out in the street outside her hotel room, Bombeck reflects on the privileges earned by a life of hard work, prudent financial management, and a taste for adventure. Over the years, not only have she and her husband (as well as, at the worst of times, her three reluctant adolescent kids) been blessed with the chance to drag 50-pound suitcases from airport terminal to taxi queue to hotel lobby to hotel room and back again (or else, when the luggage is lost in transit, to spend two weeks in Tahiti in three-piece suits), but they have splurged on bus tours that allotted 15 minutes to view the Book of Kells in Ireland and an hour and a half to tour a sweater factory; on a private car whose driver spoke English like an Italian Henry Kissinger with a lip full of Novocain; on a villa in which the staff spoke only Spanish and the guests were reduced to rubbing their tummies at the cook and saying, "Yummy, yummy!"; and on a glamorous cruise through the fjords of Norway, where Bombeck and spouse ate 17 meals a day and outgrew their clothes, only to find half the crew camped out in the exercise room. Worldly wisdom gained by years of experience with Turkish bathrooms, Montezuma's revenge, and transporting native spears home on American airlines has impressed on Bombeck the basic commonality of all cultures and has inspired her to suggest that instead of stockpiling nuclear weapons we should aim our vacation slides at one another. Classic Bombeck, in which she does away with any notionof an empty-nest syndrome. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for August.)