When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home

America's favorite housewife takes a witty look at family vacations, describing her escapades in Istanbul, the Galapagos Islands, and other locales

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.

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.