YoonnN

EDMONTON PUBLIC Sane?

Erma Bombeck takes her show on the road with this
uproarious tale of her travels to the four corners of the
globe. America’s favorite family writer is now the
world’s funniest tour guide as well.
When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time
to Go Home isn’t just a travelogue of adventures. Erma
sees travel for what it really is . .an Outward Bound
experience with diarrhea.
Traveling with her husband (who never leaves home
without anything), she has experienced Russian spas,
has eaten enough on cruises to get her own zip code,
and has attended Mass in Papua New Guinea, where
the natives appear topless. (“God, | hate being over-
dressed!)
For the neophyte traveler, she addresses the topics
ofjet lag, tipping, shopping, slides, language, and the
adventure of group tours. She is convinced that twenty-
one days of Continental breakfasts cause mood
swings and possible genetic side effects. However,
when they rented a car in Italy for an entire week, her
husband turned on the windshield wipers when he
made a left-hand turn and when he turned right,
released the hood.
Nothing escapes the fun seeker who took her par-
ents down the Amazon and bonded with her children
by planning a rafting trip down the Colorado River.
(“Standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, our
family looked like an ad for constipation.”)
With honesty ana insight, she addresses the real
questions of travelers everywhere: How many church-
es can you view in one day before you slip into a
coma? How come antiquity is never close to the
parking lot? Why is itno one ever claims the first piece
(continued on back flap)
wot
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 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/whenyoulooklikeyOO0O0erma
‘Whenou Look Like
Your Passport Photo,
ItsTime ToGo Home
 Books by Erma Bombeck
At Wit’s End

“Fust Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!”

I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression

The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank

Tf Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

Aunt Erma’s Cope Book

Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession

Family: The Ties That Bind ... and Gag!

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
Erma Bombeck
WhenYouLook Like
Your Passport Photo,
ItsTime ToGo Home

fe HarperCollinsPublishers
WHEN YOU LOOK LIKE YOUR PASSPORT PHOTO, IT’S TIME TO GO HOME. Copyright ©
1991 by Erma Bombeck. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of
America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins
Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

Designed by Karen Savary

 Contents

Papua New Guinea

Centerville, Ohio

Closing Down the House

Canada

“Honey, I Fust Ditched the Kids”

Packing

Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

The Rental Car

 CONTENTS

Italy 53

Tipping 62

Cruising the Baltic 66

Shopping fifi

South America 86

Flying for Peanuts 94

Language 104

Spain 106

Six Worst Arguments on Vacation 1 874

Death by Drivers ee)

Indonesia 128

Slides 135

Africa 138

Picking a Date for the Family Trip 148

Rafting Down the Grand Canyon 150

“Let Me Entertain You” 159

Antiquity 163

Sick 169

Mexico 175

Traveling with Parents 179

 CONTENTS

Restrooms 186

Istanbul 188

Brochure Speak 193

Alaska 197

Working Vacations 207

Russia 209

A fack Nicholson Wheat Toast Day 221

Montserrat yap)

Great Barrier Reef 230

Time to Go Home ZOD

Jet Lag 240

Homecoming 244

Papua New Guinea 250

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 Papua
New Guinea

The gunshots started about two in the morning.

They were followed closely by the sounds of broken bot-
tles being thrown at the hotel and screams from the
room next door. Lying next to me in bed was a lunatic
who brought me to this place to shed the stress of kids,
phones, and meal-planning anxiety.
This was the third week of our vacation in Papua
New Guinea, and my husband and I were in the middle
of a tribal war in a small village called Kundiawa.
In the lull, we both stared at the ceiling of the dark
 Erma Bombeck

room, not daring to move. “Call me crazy,” I said, “but

I don’t think these people have a handle on tourism.”
My husband breathed deeply. “I’ve told you before,
the fighting has nothing to do with us. It’s between two
tribes.”
“You do have a way of turning gray skies into blue,”
I said flatly.
A dog barked. In the hallway outside our door,
there were hurried footsteps and shouting that faded
quickly.
“Did you know there is no water in this hotel?” I
asked.
“How many times do I have to tell you, this is a
third-world country. You can’t expect to have a mint on
your pillow every night. You have to appreciate the
primitive charm of this place.”
“Do you think it’s safe to crawl across the floor to
the bathroom?”
“No,” he said and turned over to sleep.
I couldn’t close my eyes. What was I doing here? I
was a woman who washed her tennis shoes every week
sleeping on a pillow without a case. A woman who
hyperventilated when she found a roach in her grocery
bag sharing a park restroom with a snake coiled just
above the commode. A woman who brought one nice
dress with her to wear to church on Sundays only to dis-
cover the natives went to Mass topless. God, I hated
being overdressed!
Vacations always sound so great on paper. They are
 Papua New Guinea

supposed to save your marriage, save your sanity, bring

about understanding in the world, clear up your skin—
all those things. The truth is if you do them right,
they’re hard work. They’re like an Outward Bound
experience with diarrhea. We pay a lot of money to sleep
in airports, lug around suitcases twice our body weight,
eat food we can’t identify, and put our lives in the hands
of people we have never met before.
In more than twenty years of traveling, I had to
admit, Papua New Guinea was the most unusual cul-
ture I had ever witnessed. I know that because my hus-
band told me so. He is like one of those talking cassettes
where you hit a button and it spews out details of what
you are seeing. Just push on his navel and you'll hear,
“On May 27, 1930, Papua New Guinea became the last
inhabited region on the planet to be explored by
Europeans.” He will also tell you it is crucial to see all of
this before civilization dumps its technology on it in the
name of progress.
When he delivered that soliloquy, we were standing
on a dirt street in the center of Goroko where people
had their pigs on leashes. Somehow I didn’t feel the
threat was imminent.
Their driving laws weren’t exactly out of an AAA
manual. If you are involved in an accident in Papua
New Guinea, don’t stop. Keep going until you reach the
nearest police station. There is a payback law by which
the wronged person randomly selects the next person
matching your skin color and kills him. If you hit a pig,
 Erma Bombeck

don’t even think of pausing to make restitution, but go

to the police. “And don’t forget,” my husband warned,
“if you see people walking with axes, knives, or bows
and arrows, do not stop. Keep moving.”
I remember staring at him and saying, “You have
just ruined my surprise.”
Another gunshot cracked into the night. I shook my
husband awake. “Are you wearing your Mickey Mouse
underwear today?”
“Yes,” he said sleepily.
“Then tomorrow must be Wednesday . . . Joe
Palooka day.”
“Try to get some sleep,” he said. He resumed
snoring.
The underwear. It had all seemed so long ago since
we arrived here. We were scheduled to stop off in
Papeete in Tahiti for a couple of days to get over jet lag
before pushing on to Port Moresby. I remember it was
eleven o’clock at night when the luggage carousel
ground to a sickening halt and we realized we were the
last two people there. I had my luggage, but my hus-
band had the look of a man who had just had his life-
support system removed.
“My luggage! It’s not here,” he gasped. “It’s proba-
bly still on the plane here in Tahiti. I’m going to check
on it before the plane takes off.”
I grabbed his arm. “Grow up! It’s not still on the
plane. It’s probably back in Phoenix.”
“Everything I own is in those suitcases. My binocu-
 Papua New Guinea

lars, my film, all my clothes and toiletries.”

“Did I ever tell you about that grandmother from
Fort Lauderdale?”
“Yes,” he said miserably, looking for an agent.
“She was going to her grandson’s wedding in
Pittsburgh and her luggage went to Canada?”
“You told me,” he said.
“The airline told her if she didn’t receive her lug-
gage in twenty-four hours, she would receive $35 for
new underwear, but that was the least of her problems
because all she had to wear to the wedding were the
slack suit and sneakers she had traveled in. Are you sure
Ididn’t tell you this?”
“Do you see a representative of the airline any-
where?”
“Anyway,” I continued, “the family tried to come
to the rescue, but the mother of the bride was too short
and too thin, so she finally ended up in something that
fit—a blue maternity dress. They washed out the old
spots and dried it with a hair dryer and she marched
down the aisle between her two grandsons wearing a
maternity dress and a pair of gold bedroom slippers.”
“Make your point,” he said, irritably shuffling
through the claim forms.
“The point is we are en route to Papua New
Guinea for a trip down the Sepik River and you are
dressed like an investment broker.”
“The luggage will show up,” he said.
My last words on the subject were “In your dreams.”
 Erma Bombeck

He had ignored the first commandment of adven-

turers everywhere, “Thou shalt not travel with anything
thou cannot carry at a dead run for half a mile and store
under thy seat.” He was learning firsthand what a man
in St. Louis found out when he told the ticket agent he
was going to Dallas and asked, “Can you check my lug-
gage through to Honolulu and Passaic, New Jersey,
first?” When the agent said he couldn’t dothat, the pas-
senger replied, “Funny, you routed it there last week.”
Two days passed in Tahiti. . . two days of lounging
around the pool in a business suit. I told him, “Stick a
lamp cord in your ear and everyone will think you’re a
Secret Service agent.” On the fourth day out, I con-
vinced him his luggage had gone to that big Bermuda
Triangle in the sky. He simply had to go shopping.
Port Moresby looked like the best shot to pull
together a wardrobe, considering it is the capital city of
Papua New Guinea and the main gateway to the South
Pacific. It would probably offer the best shopping before
we went into the highlands of the Wahgi Valley, the
small towns of Lae and Madang, or the primitive vil-
lages dotting the Sepik River. We expected the selection
of clothes to be limited. That was a given. But we didn’t
anticipate the real problem of shopping in Port
Moresby.
Papua New Guinea has an indigenous population.
Its people are the products of dozens of ethnic groups,
mostly Melanesians. There are bearded highlanders,
hook-nose lowlanders, men who wear body armor, wig
 Papua New Guinea

men, mud men, warriors, fishermen, farmers, and

mountaineers. With the exception of the people of the
North Solomons, they all have one thing in common.
They are short. Real short. They don’t walk under cof-
fee tables, but most of them are no more than four feet
tall.
When my husband, who is six feet tall and wears a
size twelve shoe, walked into the menswear department
in Port Moresby, the salesman didn’t know whether to
launch him or erect him in the center of town and direct
traffic around him. In metric, he was awesome. There
are a few Australians in the city, but mostly you’re look-
ing at little people who go around talking earnestly to
belt buckles.
I must also add that Papuan New Guineans are the
world’s friendliest people. Upon meeting you they will
grasp your hand excitedly, say good morning, and begin
a conversation. (In the bush the greetings are a little
more graphic. Women push in your chest with both of
their hands. When I asked how the men greeted one
another, our guide said, “You don’t want to know.”
As my husband flipped through the racks of little
shirts and troll shorts, he said, “This has got to be the
boys’ department.”
“No, no, it’s for men,” said our salesperson, a
young kid who never stopped smiling. During a lull, he
turned to me and said, “Did you know that Number
One Jesus Man was just here?”
“And who would that be?” I asked.
 Erma Bombeck

“The Pope. Do you know him? He came to Port

Moresby and kissed the ground.”
I told him I had not had the pleasure.
Then he observed, “You are from America?” I nod-
ded. “Then perhaps you know a friend of mine. He lives
in Chicago.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
My husband stared at me astonished. “Are you
crazy?” he whispered. “Do you know the odds of—”
“His name is Joe,” said the clerk.
“T only know one Joe in Chicago,” I said.
“It’s probably him.” He smiled.
I waited on a small chair while my husband parad-
ed in and out of the dressing room in one little outfit
after another looking for approval. After several pairs of
trousers that would have seen him through a Texas
flood, I said, “I’m telling you this as a friend. Stick to
the shorts.”
Reinforced by a gym bag filled with underwear
emblazoned in old comic strip characters, a couple pairs
of shorts, and a few T-shirts, we embarked on our first
adventure through a country where women are consid-
ered currency and isolated ceremonial cannibalism was
practiced as recently as the 1950s.
If nothing else, the limited wardrobe took away
major decisions. We measured time by my husband’s
underwear. Every Monday he wore the Blondie and
Dagwood print while Tuesday’s Mickey Mouse print was
drying and Wednesday’s Joe Palooka was being washed.
 Papua New Guinea

The drive through the highlands was incredibly

lush and beautiful. At one point our driver pointed out a
remote spot where a plane had gone down several years
ago. “The natives saw it fall to the ground,” he said,
“and when they got there, two were still alive.”
“They took them to the hospital?” I asked.
“They ate them,” he said.
It gave new meaning to the catch-of-the-day.
We stopped at a few burial caves where villagers
inter their family by propping the skeletons up on a
ledge or leaning them against the wall. It reminded me
of a spa in California where I spent a week once, but
that’s another chapter.
In retrospect, if you have to lose your luggage, trav-
eling down the Sepik River is the best place to lose it.
It’s a fairly laid-back country that gives a California
lifestyle the pomp of a coronation. There were ten of
us—mostly Australians—who boarded the Melanesian
Explorer for our trip down the Sepik.
The ship was comfortable and clean, but it had an
African Queen quality to it. I say this because we board-
ed right after dinner one night in Madang and when we
awakened, I strolled out on deck with a cup of coffee
only to realize we hadn’t left the dock yet. Humphrey
Bogart was still fixing the motor.
The cabins were air conditioned and were listed in
the brochure as having showers, but all I saw was a toi-
let. When I mentioned this to my husband, he said,
“Look up.” I hadn’t done that since the snake incident.
 Erma Bombeck

But sure enough, a small nozzle came out of the ceiling,

making it possible to sit on the commode and shower at
the same time if you were on a tight schedule.
Ironically, I had no trouble filling my time on the
Explorer. I read and slept, and one night a mosquito
asked me to dance after dinner.
A word about mosquitoes. There are two kinds of
people in this world: those who do not attract mosquitoes
and those who do. I not only belong to the second group,
but I have documented proof that mosquitoes actually
subscribe to a newsletter telling the whereabouts of
feasts like me. They then book passage on commercial
planes (first class) and get to wherever I am.
People think mosquitoes are all alike. They are not.
Alaskan mosquitoes are equipped with rotary blades like a
helicopter. They will hover two inches from your face and
hum like a barbershop harmony convention in progress.
In the South Pacific, because of their size,
mosquitoes are required to file flight plans. They make
virtually little sound. The only hint you have that your
entire body is under attack is that your tan goes pale. It’s
like giving blood at the Red Cross without the cookie.
In between navigating the river, we would stop off
at small villages and visit large two-story structures
called Haus Tambarans. These are where the talents of
the Sepik flourish: wood carvings, jewelry, primitive
masks, and story boards crafted by local artisans. The
natives have a unique way of bargaining you never see in
any other part of the world. I picked up a rough-hewn

10
 Papua New Guinea

carving of a mother and child and asked, “How much?”

The man smiled and recited in perfect English, “First
price, $300. Second price, $80.” He waited anxiously
for my decision.
Sometimes at night when you entered a village by
torchlight because there was no electricity or you
watched the men of the village digging out a new canoe
while their children splashed naked in the river, you had
a fierce urge to protect all ofitfrom hemorrhoid com-
mercials and Golden Arches. After a while, you even
stopped fighting the inconveniences and gave in to
them. I got used to being the only non—nursing mother
in an airport. If the plane was full, a “frequent flyer”
wearing nothing but “arse grass” around his waist
(which is exactly what it sounds like) would smile a red
betel-nut smile, pull a sack of onions into the aisle, and
sit down beside you. (Hey, they’d put their mothers in
the overhead racks if that’s all the room that was left.)
At an open market one day, a Papuan New
Guinean asked if I had a husband. I assured him I did. I
couldn’t believe he asked me to point him out. You
could hardly miss him. He was the one with the whitest
legs in North America and the only one in the country
taller than a car.
“Are you his only wife?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re Catholic.”
He said he was too, and he had three wives. I won-
dered what the Number One Jesus Man would have
thought about that.

11
 Erma Bombeck

As light reluctantly entered the room in Kundiawa,

I realized with relief that things had quieted down a bit.
It had been a while since I heard glass shatter or guns
explode. I felt rotten. My head ached, my body alternat-
ed with chills and fever. Occasionally, my bones felt like
someone was snapping them in half. Crawling along the
floor until I reached the bathroom, I switched on the
light. It was not a pretty sight. My eyes were bloodred
and my vision wasn’t great. My skin had a yellow pallor.
I dropped to the floor and crawled back into bed where
I shook my husband awake.
“T don’t want to panic you, but I wanted to say
goodbye and tell you your second wife will rot in hell
before I tell her where my dinner ring is hidden. I har-
bor no bad feelings for being dragged to this godforsak-
en place where they have never heard of Liz Claiborne.”
“It’s stress.” He yawned. “Try to get some sleep.”
“Not until you tell me a story,” I said stubbornly.
He took a deep breath. “All right, which one do
you want to hear?”
“Tell me the one again about what we are doing
here.”
“Very well.” He smiled. “But you’ve got to promise
me that you’ll go to sleep... no more stalling... no
more drinks of water. ...”
“There is no water,” I reminded him.
“Right. Well, once upon a time, many many years
ago, there was a young princess who lived in the subur-
ban kingdom of Centerville, Ohio, with her handsome

12
 Papua New Guinea

prince and their three children. It seemed like a story-

book existence except every summer when all her
friends went on journeys to magic places, she took care
of their houses, brought in their mail, and fed their
dogs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, every summer the
Semple family visited their cottage....”
I quivered. “I always get a chill at this part.”
“T know,” he said softly. “As time went by the
princess put her royal foot down and said, “There has to
be something more to summers than this! I’m going to
travel all over the world and feast at the banquet table of
lifenald 6
I slept.

13
 Centerville, Ohio

As the front door of Helen and Hal’s house slammed

shut, I deposited her house key in my slacks pocket like a
matron at a maximum security prison. I didn’t relish telling
Helen and her family when they returned from Hawaii that
their bird had died. Or that her Boston fern went into car-
diac arrest the day after she left.
As I made my way across the yard connecting
our houses, I wondered if Helen’s mother would
mention to her that when she dropped by to stock the
refrigerator for their return, I thought she was an
intruder and called the police. Silly me. Her mother
had probably forgotten the incident by this time.

14
 Centerville, Ohio

I tossed Helen’s mail and her newspaper in a card-

board box in the hallway by the front door and made a
mental note that tomorrow I would have to eat the three
bananas she had left on her drainboard. They were
starting to attract fruit flies.
How many summers had I housesat for Helen?
How many times had I waved goodbye as they honked
their horn before they pulled out of the driveway headed
for paradise? How many picturesque postcards had
found their way to our mailbox? Our family never went
on vacations. It was always something. No sooner
would we get the Christmas bills under control than the
transmission fell out of the car, the clothes dryer caught
fire, or the orthodontist wanted $2,000 to straighten the
teeth of a kid who never smiled anyway. This year it
was, “Daddy! Daddy! Our grass is wet and squishy
under my bedroom window and it smells!”
I didn’t understand it. Helen and Hal didn’t make
any more money than we did, yet every year they pored
over brochures, planned, saved, and traveled. The four
of them returned invigorated and ready to face another
fifty weeks of mortgage payments and car repairs.
We had had one vacation since our marriage.
Because my husband was a social studies teacher, the
senior class offered to pay our way for their class trip to
Washington and New York if we would serve as chaper-
ones. Someone should have warned us that the only
place you can tour comfortably with thirty-five sexually
active seniors is Arlington Cemetery. (And then only if

15
 Erma Bombeck

you connect them to a single rope and have them walk

in single file.) |
A horn honked in the driveway, interrupting my
moment of self-pity. It was the Semples, Howard, Fay,
and their three kids . . . right on schedule.
The five of them stopped by every summer from
Rochester, New York, on their way to visit Howard’s
brother in California. It was all too predictable. Fay
would hop out of the car and say, “Let’s get unpacked.
We have so much to catch up on.” We’d catch up after
fifteen minutes and spend the rest of the time talking
about gas mileage, lawn diseases, and people who died
whom they said we remembered but we never knew.
Actually, we didn’t know Fay and Howard real well.
When they lived in Centerville, their daughter Sissy
took piano lessons from the same teacher as my daugh-
ter. We met every year at the piano recital. For three
years in a row, Sissy played “There’s a Fairy in the
Bottom of My Teacup.” No one had the heart to tell the
Semples the kid had reached the level of her incompe-
tence. At one of these recitals, my husband inadvertent-
ly spilled punch down Fay’s back. A conversation
ensued. She told him that they were moving to
Rochester because Howard had a job offer. My hus-
band, Bill Inter-Continental, said, “Don’t be a stranger.
If you ever get back to Centerville, pop on by.”
Fay carried her klutzy little makeup kit (which was
never more than three feet away from her body) inside
while I kicked one large suitcase on wheels and balanced

16
 Centerville, Ohio

a weekender and a duffel bag under each arm.

“Does Bill still spill drinks down women’s backs?”
She giggled.
“He does it for a living now.” I smiled.
The Semple family was not without talents.
Howard had been training for the gargling Olympics all
of his life. Every day, he began just before the sun came
up, continuing through breakfast and again in the
evening when everyone was in bed trying to sleep.
Fay had a gift for becoming “domestically dead”
the moment she walked out of her own home. She did
not know how to start a washer or plug in an iron, and
had no curiosity as to how to turn on a stove. She just
looked helpless all the time and whimpered, “If I knew
where things went, I’d put them away” and then walked
into another room to watch television.
One child, Howard Jr., could bounce a rubber ball
against the house for fifteen hours straight. His brother,
Edwin, stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, and
Sissy, who looked like a Hallmark greeting card, was a
terrorist from hell. She would sneak up behind you, dig
her nails into your flesh, and then look innocent when
her victim cried out in pain.
Howard and Fay usually stayed about five days.
One year they had been there nine days when a part
went out on their car and they had to send for a new
one. The dealership was behind the Iron Curtain.
That night, as I turned carefully in the bunk bed
and pulled the Star Wars sheets under my chin, I

17;
 Erma Bombeck

thought about Fay and Howard sprawled out in our

queen-size bed and wondered why we did it. Face it.
The Semples didn’t care about us. We were no more
than a stagecoach stop-off, one of the last free meals
between their destination and the California freeway. It
was eleven o’clock. Howard was still gargling and
Howard Jr. was bouncing a rubber ball against the side
of the house.

Our guests would spend their mornings watching

television while I finished my chores and packed the
lunch. In the afternoons, we would do the “tours.” This
included the malls, the air force museum, and the home
of the Wright Brothers. As we pointed proudly to the
homestead of the men who brought wings of flight to
the world and changed the destiny of man, Howard
punched Fay in the arm and said, “Looks like you’re
going to miss ‘As the World Turns’ again this afternoon,
tootsie.”
The goodbyes were always tearful . . . for different
reasons. The Semples were about to reenter a world of
tipping, paying through the nose for food and lodgings,
and doing their own laundry. Little Edwin was about to
discover that hotel pictures are bolted to the wall and
lamps are screwed to the nightstands. We had tears of
joy. We were returning to our own beds.
We had survived another summer with the
Semples. But something happened this particular year
to change our lives. They had been gone two days when

18
 Centerville, Ohio

the phone rang. “This is Howard. I hate to call collect,

but I’m in a gas station in Barstow, California. Sissy just
told us she left her gerbil at your house. It’s in a Quaker
Oats box with holes in the lid. She left it on the back of
the commode in the hallway.”
“No problem,” I said stiffly.
“The gerbil is pregnant,” he continued, “and it’s
pretty special to Sissy. As a favor, if you could just take
care of it and the babies until we drop by on our way
home, we’d appreciate it.”
As I hung up the phone, something in me snapped.
I gathered the family around me and in a shaking voice
announced, “The Bombeck Hilton will henceforth be
closed during the months of June, July, and August. No
more entertaining the parade of visitors who find their
way to our driveway. No more housesitting for those
around us who see the world and send us postcards
reminding us to ‘worm the dog’ and ‘soak the trees.’
“From here on in, we are going to be one of those
families who feast at the banquet table of life. We’re
going to drink in the beauty of majestic mountains, nib-
ble at historical shrines, and stuff ourselves on beaches
drenched in solitude. The Bombecks are going to hit the
road!
“By all that is holy, I will never host the Semples
again!” The family’s eyes were frozen on my clenched
fist raised above my head. I was clutching the pregnant
gerbil.

19
 Closing Down the
FHouse

My husband said, “When you’re leaving town, it is

wise to tell as few people as possible.”
I hate it when he talks down to me. What does he
think I am? Stupid? The only people I told we were leav-
ing town were:

Tim, our paperboy, who had to tell his branch man-

ager and his sub.
Ralph, our postman, who is not only going to hold
our mail, but offered to put a note on the post
office bulletin board for someone to cut our grass.

20
 Closing Down the House

Helen, who has our house key.

My-aerobics class and instructor, hairdresser, and
dentist.
The entire waiting room at the kennel where I made
arrangements to board the dog.
Marj at the bank, who made out our traveler’s
checks.
Shirley at AAA, who routed our trip.
‘The saleswoman who helped me with a bathing suit
and the nice man who sold me a new piece of lug-
gage.
The water softener deliveryman whom I told about
the key I keep under the white rock at the end of
the drive.
The dry cleaners ... in idle conversation.
Sam, our druggist, who prescribed something for
extreme exposure to sun and children.
The Little League coach and the team.
Evelyn, who was giving a birthday party for Stef and
needed to know why we weren’t coming.
The society editor, Marjabelle Mix, who wanted a
little paragraph for her weekly column.

I may not be the most sophisticated traveler who

ever hit the road, but I know enough to sneak out of
town.

21
 Canada

The first time we saw the twenty-two-foot travel

trailer, it was parked next to a carport with license plates
that had not been renewed in five years. The For Sale
sign was fly-specked.
Our entire family encircled it with excitement and
wondered what kind of people could part with such a
treasure. It was so compact—so self-contained. As my
husband and the owner kicked the tires, his wife gave
the kids and me a tour of the inside.
The owner worked swiftly. She whipped off
the sofa pillows and jammed them into the broom
closet, flipped over.the table into a bed, and

22
 Canada

pulled down the bookshelves into a bunk.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “How does one get into
the bunk?”
“You either walk on the face of the person sleeping
on the table or boost yourself up by putting your foot on
the stove. Make sure the burners are off,” she said dryly.
“The kitchen seems rather small.” I smiled. “Is
there a refrigerator?”
“Of course there’s a refrigerator,” she said. “Your
handbag is covering it. To open the door, everyone but
you goes outside. When the door opens, you jump in
the sink.”
I lingered as she forged ahead to the next section.
“Here you have your private quarters.” There was a
twin bed on either side of the trailer, divided by a small
aisle. ““There’s even a toilet,” she added.
pAndsthe dooris-o0 >
“There isn’t any door,” she said. “You won’t use
the toilet anyway. It smells. Youll note there’s plenty of
room under the beds to store your food, clothes, and
blankets. Did you notice the cupboards on the walls?
Just tell your husband not to make any sudden stops or
everything flies open and you’re looking at three days of
mopping up.”
I fingered a spray nozzle attached to a hose. “How
nice. A vegetable brush in the shower.”
“That zs the shower,” she said crisply.
I raced to the door, but it was too late. My husband was
shaking hands with the former owner, who held our check.

23
 Erma Bombeck

As we hooked the trailer up to our car, the man

pocketed the money and observed, “There goes a piece
of our history, Mother. We’ll miss it.” Her eyes
remained dry. “Like the Depression,” she said.
Traveling with three kids and dragging a trailer
behind us wasn’t the swiftest thing we ever did. In
retrospect, I should never have given birth to more
children than we had car windows. In fact, after a
week on the road with them and knowing what I
know now, we should have bought a Porsche and
rented kids.
“Mom, where are we going again?” the child riding
the “hard middle seat” whined. I clutched the steering
wheel and stared straight ahead. “Ask your father.”
My husband put down the road map. “Don’t dis-
tract your mother. She’s driving. We’re going to see one
of the most breathtaking phenomena in the world, the
Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada.”
“Tell us again why we’re going there,” queried
another bored voice.
“Because you are going to see something that few
people have ever seen . . . a bore that comes surging up
the Petitcodiac River with a tidal wave that rises to a
staggering height of eleven feet at the rate of eight to
eleven feet an hour.”
“Speaking of tidal waves,” said the third voice from
the back seat, “I have to go.”
“You should have gone before-you left home,” said
their father.

24
 Canada

“Dad! That was four days ago. Mom, look for a

place to stop:”
“T told you before, don’t bother your mother. She’s
got her hands full driving this rig,” said my husband.
He got that part right. “Mom” wasn’t driving. She
was frozen to the steering wheel like she was dragging a
tank of nuclear waste material behind her. Every time I
looked at the large mirrors on either door, I could see
three miles of travel trailers behind me and cars backed
up to the United States border.
For the last five hundred miles, I had been follow-
ing Ruby and Rusty of Kendallville, Indiana, in their
RV, True Love. The thought of passing them would
have brought on premature menopause.
So far, it hadn’t been much of a vacation. Neither
of us had anticipated the stress of hauling all this ton-
nage along the highway. That sweet little couple,
Bonnie and Clyde who sold us the travel trailer, never
told us the joys of hitting downtown Detroit at five P.M.
or the thrill of meeting another car-on a bridge designed
for a compact and a bicycle. And they certainly never
prepared us for the nightly ritual called “parking your
home on wheels for the night.”
Parking was an exercise for the entire family. My
husband needed all the help he could get. He watched
the two large mirrors mounted on either door of the car,
one child near the rear wheels picked his nose, another
at the opposite rear wheel threw rocks at squirrels, and a
third child searched for a toilet. It was my job to stand

Zs
 Erma Bombeck

off to one side and coordinate the operation.

“Turn your wheels that way,” I shouted. !
“Which way? I can’t see you. That means nothing
to me.”
“Left. Turn them left.”
“The trailer wheels or the car wheels left?” he
shouted.
“Whichever ones make your back wheels straighten
out.
»
“Ts that better?”
PRighe*
“Ts that right as in OK, or right as in turn right? I
can’t see you in all this rain, you know.”
“That’s because you didn’t listen when I yelled
stop. It isn’t raining. You just hit the water connection.”
“I’m pulling up again. And for God’s sake give me
better directions. Who are you waving at? Do you want
me to go that way?”
“I’m waving to our neighbors.”
“Forget the neighbors till we get this parked, then
you can get friendly.”
“We'd better get friendly now. You just backed into
theiritent,;
It was always a problem. One day in Quebec, it was
two o’clock in the afternoon and we had not had lunch
because we couldn’t find a place to park the trailer...
something the size of a stadium. In desperation, my hus-
band pulled alongside an abandoned railroad track.
After lunch, it was my son’s and my turn to put the

26
 Canada

Barbie and Ken kitchen back in order. The rest of the

family took a walk. That’s when we heard the train
whistle. Both of us froze. It’s funny what you think
about when your last seconds on earth are imminent.
You don’t do any of the things you’re supposed to do
like grab the picture albums or fall to your knees and
confess your sins. All I could think about was those
women on the 7itanic who had refused dessert the night
the ship hit an iceberg because their clothes felt tight. As
my son hummed “Nearer My God to Thee,” I stuffed a
Twinkie in my mouth as the train roared by. Every dish
in the trailer crashed to the floor.
My mind drifted back to the True Love, and I won-
dered if Rusty and Ruby of Kendallville, Indiana, were
having a good time. You get to know a lot about people
you have been following for five hundred miles. I knew
they had a Baby on Board, had been to Williamsburg
and Knotts Berry Farm, and were members of the
NRA. They liked the open road and had a bumper
sticker that read CAMPERS ARE THE MOST HONEST PEO-
PLE IN THE WORLD. (They also had a lock on their gas
tank.)
Somehow, I knew that Rusty was driving and Ruby
was reading a road map to her husband who “knew
damn well he was going east and if the sun was setting
there, then God had made a mistake!” Rusty was crabby
because he couldn’t find a holding station to empty the
waste and they couldn’t use their self-contained toilet.
Ruby worried about the brakes burning out when they

27
 Erma Bombeck

went downhill. Her life had no meaning without a laun-

dromat. The big saucepan she used to cook spaghetti in
now held bait. Their kids ordered $10 dinners in restau-
rants and ate only the pickle. Their dog got carsick and
rode with his head out of the window with his fanny in
Ruby’s face.
My husband put down the road map again. “We’ve
only made ten miles today. No wonder. Look who
you’re following. It’s Rusty and Ruby again. Pass him.
He’s only going thirty-five miles per hour.”
“We’re going uphill,” I said. “I don’t have the
power.”
As we descended, Rusty sped up to sixty-five miles
per hour. He was incredible when you thought about it.
He never stopped for scenic views. Never got gas. He
had to have kidneys the size of basketballs. If he didn’t
pick it up, we’d never get to the Bay of Fundy.

All told, the trip would take a month. It would take

us through the breathtaking forests of Ontario, where
our evenings would be spent watching bears eat food in
the dump. We would inch our way through the narrow
cobblestone streets of Quebec and wind along the St.
Lawrence River, around the snakelike coast of the
Gaspé. On Prince Edward Island, we would scour the
beaches for clams, and in Nova Scotia we would sit on
the grass and listen to bagpipe concerts.
Well, some of us would. Others of us would carry
water, build fires, hustle garbage, and spend most of our

28
 Canada

waking hours in a laundromat. While the family was

pretending they were throwbacks from a wagon train, I
spent most of my time scrounging for quarters and
watching my enzymes and bleach race their way to the
dirt and grime in our underwear.
‘The camping experience turned out to be as joyous
as giving birth. Each day brought new challenges and
tests of our tolerance for one another. But no matter
how many flat tires we changed, how many repairs we
needed for things that leaked and boiled over, no matter
how many times I was tempted to make a necklace out
of Valium and lick at them all day long, our goal always
sustained us. We were going to see the great tidal bore at
the Bay of Fundy. No one in our neighborhood had
seen anything like that!
We arrived in the small town of Moncton in New
Brunswick in the early afternoon and drove our travel
trailer to the banks of the Petitcodiac River. My hus-
band turned his attention to his camera, mounting it
carefully on a tripod and trying out different locations. I
passed out slickers to the children with orders to stand
back at a safe distance and hold Mommy’s hand tightly
lest they be sucked into the jaws of the powerful waters.
At around 3:05, the buzz of anticipation by the
spectators became hushed. There was an eerie silence as
binoculars were trained on the flow of rolling water in
the distance. -
We strained our ears to hear the roar of rushing
waves we knew would soon come crashing against the

22
 Erma Bombeck

shore. Our eyes searched to glimpse the wild wall of

force that would leave us wet and breathless. ,
At 3:10, a small trickle of brown water, barely visi-
ble, slowly edged its way down the river toward us with
all the excitement of a stopped-up toilet. The five of us
stared silently as the dribble lazily lapped the shore like a
kitten with warm milk. I retained more water than that.
The crowd was underwhelmed and stood staring like
statues. It was a long time before anyone in our family
spoke. About five thousand miles to be exact.
In the fall, the kids used the travel trailer to enter-
tain sleepovers. But for the most part, after the
Canadian trip, it occupied a space between the garbage
cans and the garage. The For Sale sign in the rear win-
dow was as aggressive as we got.
One day that winter, a young serviceman and his
wife knocked at the door and asked to see it. He was sta-
tioned nearby and needed low-cost housing they could
park near the base. As our husbands kicked the tires, I
showed the young bride the inside of the trailer. When I
finished, she said quietly, “The sink seems rather
small.”
“Not really,” I said. “It seats one real comfortably.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Do you use the refrigerator a lot?”
She hesitated. “Not a whole lot.”
“Then it isn’t important.” I smiled.
By the time she rushed to her husband’s side, it was
too late. The check was in my husband’s hand.

30
 Canada

During the rest of that winter, I thought a lot about

our first attempt at “quality time.” Was it possible there
were vacations where you didn’t have to carry your own
toilet paper and dispose of your own waste? Somewhere
was there a wonderland where nightlife was more than a
ranger picking his teeth with a matchbook cover and
showing slides of “The Birth of a Bog”?
Some of our friends had actually gone on trips
where they didn’t have to cut up everyone’s meat or lis-
ten to a car radio that made their teeth swell. They visit-
ed a world where crying children belonged to someone
else, and when they stretched out their arms on the back
seat to relax, someone didn’t put wads of chewing gum
in their hands.
That’s the world I wanted to explore.

31
 “Honey, | Just Ditched
the Kids”

When my children get their own literary agent (and

it is only a matter of time), the first chapter in their
Dearest book will record this moment in great detail.
They will describe how they sat on the edge of the
bed watching Mommy and Daddy pack for a twenty-
one-day European Getaway.
As they fight back tears of rejection, they will reflect
on how they were left behind with nothing but $5,000
worth of toys, a $2,000 entertainment center, enough
soft drinks to launch the QE2, color-coordinated

32
 “Honey, I Just Ditched the Kids”

menus, and an overpriced babysitter who would hover

over them like security in a Loehmann’s dressing room.
They will tell of how their mother traveled twelve thou-
sand miles with a blowfish balanced between her knees
to buy their affection back. Their book will inspire
tabloid headlines: My DAD WAS TOO BUSY TO BOND.
The big question that should be addressed here is
not whether parents should take their children on vaca-
tion or leave them at home. The question is, What is the
best age to leave them behind?
‘The answer is, The younger the better. People who
think teenagers can be responsible enough to be left
alone are in for a shock.
Realistically, a three-year-old does not put eight
hundred miles on your car in a week and pour diet cola
in the radiator when it boils over. A three-year-old does
not summon one hundred of her closest friends to a
party before your plane takes off. An infant will not use
“emergency funds” to replace the sliding glass door that
someone sailed a chair through.
Parents who have never before left their children for
any length of time anguish for weeks about the time they
will spend away from their kids. They will torture them-
selves with the thought of those little cherub faces waking
up in the middle of the night calling, “Mommy! Daddy!”
They will punish themselves with the memory of
those tearful reflections pressed against the window
waving bye-bye as they pull out of the driveway.
This feeling will last ten . . . fifteen minutes tops.

33
 Packing

One never realizes how different a husband and

wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip. My hus-
band has obviously never heard of the old axiom for
travelers, “Pack half the clothes you planned to take and
twice the money.”
His bed is covered with apparel.
If someone should “just happen” to award him the
Nobel Peace Prize, he has the clothes for it.
He has the wardrobe to parachute behind enemy
lines dressed as a mercenary and clothes to comman-
deer a torpedo boat through a squall.
If there is a bar mitzvah, ten-kilometer run, cos-

34
 Packing

tume party, fire in the hotel, bowling tournament, west-

ern cookout, or rain for forty days and forty nights, he’s
ready.
He can attend an underwater wedding or a moun-
tain hike, change a tire or christen a ship.
He has clothes to barter for mules and guides in a
Colombian jungle as well as outfits for snorkeling,
safaris, high teas, low ceilings; clothes for lounging and
clothes to leave behind as tips.
He has an iron that weighs thirteen ounces and
folds into the size of a ballpoint pen, a hair dryer, and a
global clock that tells you the time where you’re not.
(He will never have the right voltage to use any of these
items.)
He has a personal coffeepot, cassette player, and
gym bag full of language cassettes. He carries Tom
Clancy’s latest eight-hundred-page hardcover novel, a
pair of binoculars, a calculator that figures out what the
U.S. dollar translates to, lead-laminated pouches to pro-
tect his film, a Swiss army knife, and several rolls of toi-
let tissue. He covers each of his shoes in a little bag as if
he is gift-wrapping it.
Off to one side is his food stash. These are little
boxes and packets in separate bags that he clings to like
diplomatic pouches that he never lets out of his sight.
There’s a supply of granola, crackers, dried soups,
fruits, beef jerky, snacks, and candy bars. I don’t know
how to tell him London is not a third-world city.
I, on the other hand, have benefited from the

35
 Erma Bombeck

advice of Sylvia Suitcase (probably not her real name), a

packing expert who appeared one day on Sally Jessy
Raphael. Sylvia said if you really planned carefully you
could make one hundred and thirty-five combinations
out of a twelve-piece wardrobe and be well-dressed for
three weeks.
Stacked neatly on my bed is my ensemble: a
basic dress, reversible skirt, slacks, blouse, jacket,
shorts, T-shirt, vest, two scarves, cap with a bill, and
jumpsuit for airline travel, plus underwear and a few toi-
letries.
When my husband’s luggage is stacked by the door
it will look like the road company of Les Miserables. Just
before I zipped my single overnighter suitcase, he said to
me, “By the way, do you have room for my tripod?” For
those of you who think pictures grow on postcards, I
will explain that a tripod is a three-legged stand that
supports a camera so it will remain perfectly still. When
fully extended, a tripod will stand waist-high and weigh
in at two or three pounds.
Men with tripods will tell you how they were able
to capture a hummingbird with crossed eyes or a cloud
over the Kremlin that looked like the ghost of Billy
Crystal, but they won’t tell you their tripod was in their
room at the time.
“What do you need a tripod for?” I ask patiently.
“Just in case I want to keep my camera steady while
I take a spectacular shot of the Alps or something.”
“You borrowed an Instamatic camera from my father

36
 Packing

that fits in your shirt pocket. What’s to steady?” I ask.

I know better than to argue. I jam the tripod on top
of my twelve-piece basic ensemble that can make one
hundred and thirty-five combinations and keep me well-
dressed for three weeks.
I snap my suitcase shut, lock it, and sit down on the
bed to wait.
We are scheduled to leave for Europe in two weeks.

37
 Twenty-One-Day
European Getaway

I said it was our ninth country and our fourteenth

continental breakfast. My husband said I was wrong. It
was our fifth country and our twelfth continental break-
fast.
I waved the itinerary under his nose as our bus sped
along the autobahn in Germany. We had been snapping
at one another since Amsterdam—or was it Austria?—
and we didn’t know why. I blamed our surliness on the
continental breakfasts. There was no doubt in my mind
that it caused mood swings and possible genetic side

38
 Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

effects. Since day one, the morning meal had not varied
once. It consisted of a paper napkin, a knife, a fork and
spoon for which we had no use, a cup and saucer,
canned fruit juice, a pot of coffee or tea, and a container
of marmalade. There was, of course, the proverbial hard
roll.
For the first few days of our nine-country, twenty-
one-day European Getaway, there were smiles from the
group when the continental breakfasts were put before
them. Women pinched their waists and said, “This is
what I need. I promised myself I wouldn’t pig out.” By
the end of the first week, no one spoke when the basket
of hard rolls was placed on the table. We all knew the
truth. The continental breakfast is not designed to make
you thin. Even if it is eaten in small pieces, it will
expand and distribute itself on your hips and thighs
until you are molded into its image. My husband
accused the tour company of issuing the same rolls
every morning. He said they scooped up the uneaten
ones and forwarded them to our next destination. I told
him he was being ridiculous, but he was adamant. He
carved his initials and the date in a hard roll in Dublin
and said he would prove his point when we got to Paris.
We knew the trip was structured when we signed on
for it. After all, wasn’t that the point? We were neophyte
travelers who had never been out of the country before.
We would see as much as we possibly could in a limited
amount of time. The death march was a trade-off for the
benefits of having someone take care of us, tell us what

aN]
 Erma Bombeck

to eat and when, direct us where to go and when to

leave, interpret what was being said, tell us when our
luggage was missing, and protect us from all those for-
eigners staring at us from the other side of the bus’s tint-
ed glass.
As the bus picked up speed, the exit sign loomed
majestically to our left, and everyone on the bus rolled
their eyes, knowing what was to come. The German
word for exit is Ausfahrt and every time we saw it, you
could count on eighty-seven-year-old Mr. Fleck to say
the same thing, “My mother doesn’t allow me to use
words like that.” I wanted to shout that his mother
probably swam out to meet troop ships in the Crimean
War, but my husband put his hand across my mouth
and whispered, “It’s the hard rolls talking.”
The thing about tours is that it doesn’t take long to
size up your fellow passengers and label them. They are
as stereotypical as characters out of an English mystery.
The reason you get to know them so well is that the
same group shows up on every guided tour you will ever
take. Their faces and names will change, but the person-
alities are an integral part of tour travel.
Riding in the front seat (always!) is the tour’s
Health Fairy. She’s a retired English teacher from
Boston who keeps a daily log on who is irregular and
who “got back on track” during the night. Every morn-
ing there is a report on who has bacterial problems and
where they got them. She speaks fluent pharmacy and
carries a handbag the size of a dispensary. If you have

40
 Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

swollen ankles, sore throat, motion sickness, poor circu-

lation, constipation, burning eyes, or PMS, she’s there
for you.
Seated just behind her is “Where’s Mr. Babcock?”
He is traveling alone. No one knows his first name.
“Where’s Mr. Babcock?” is all we ever hear. He has
three cameras around his neck, a vest jammed full of
film, a gym bag crammed with light meters, and a
portable tripod. Every time we pass a tree, “Where’s Mr.
Babcock?” jumps out of his seat and asks the driver to
stop so he can get a shot. When the bus makes a regular
stop for “photo opportunities,” count on “Where’s Mr.
Babcock?” to hold up the entire tour before he reboards.
In Garmisch, he shot three rolls of Ektachrome of a dog
with one ear up.
Two days ago, when “Where’s Mr. Babcock?”
defied the guide’s instructions to line up to see
Hadrian’s Wall and later remained behind to photo-
graph a man relieving himself on it, we voted on
whether to leave him there. It was real close.
Ben and his wife, Has-Ben Everywhere, are a cou-
ple from New Jersey. They have matched French lug-
gage, and they informed everyone on their first day that
they do not generally go on tours but arrange to have
their own car and driver. They do not socialize a lot with
the other group members. The only time they talk is to
mention it’s too bad we couldn’t have “done Europe”
when it was elegant. When they were there years ago,
Venus de Milo had arms. No matter what you buy, they

41
 Erma Bombeck

bought the same thing ten years ago for a fraction of

what you paid.
Everyone tries to stay out of the path of Joan and
Bud Whiner. Excuse the pun, they’re a pair-of-noids to
draw to. Every morning we are treated to their litany of
complaints. “Well, they gave us the servants’ quarters
again” is a staple. The food is inedible, the service unac-
ceptable, and the tour company is going to hear from
them. In Rome, they felt the church tour was tilted in
favor of Catholic churches.
I cannot say Mr. Murchison’s name without whis-
pering it. Everyone else does. When the group ren-
dezvoused in New York, he had taken a few belts to
“relax.” We never saw him tense. He is “over-served” in
every country we visit. Somehow, he can’t be catego-
rized as an “ugly American.” You have to be conscious
to be that. He simply is seeing Europe through the bot-
tom of a Jack Daniels bottle. If he would remain quiet,
we could put a handle in his mouth and check him
through as another piece of luggage. But Mr. Murchison
likes to sing when he’s had a few drinks. In Limerick,
Ireland, he stood up in the Cathedral of St. Mary and
sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” In Amsterdam,
when we toured the red-light district where the prosti-
tutes sit in store windows on chairs, he warbled “How
Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” In Venice, he
nearly fell into the canal singing “O Sole Mio.”
He didn’t sing in Lucerne. However, he did put his
cigarette out in the fondue.

42
 Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

The couple I like are Mary Jo and her mother, Lil.

Like us, it’s their first trip out of the country and they’re
thrilled with everything they see. When Lil saw her “first
Irish dog,” she could barely speak. Mary Jo is keeping a
diary right down to the menus.
In the back of the bus are the poor Jacksons. They
don’t have first names either. They’re a couple from
Oklahoma who are being followed by their luggage
across Europe. But not close enough. They have been
wearing the same clothes for seventeen days.
I relate to the Jacksons. That stupid jumpsuit that
Sylvia Suitcase recommended is so stiff from wearing, it
could walk to Rome by itself. Not only that, I discov-
ered you have to have the talents of a stripper to wear it.
On a plane en route from New York to London, I
was in the restroom when the captain announced we
were experiencing turbulence and should return to our
seats. Before I could get it all together, my jumpsuit
dropped to thirty-two thousand feet in a pool of water
while my body leveled off at thirty-four-thousand feet.
When I finally emerged from the bathroom, my hus-
band observed, “You don’t look good enough to have
been in there that long.”
“Don’t start with me,” I said. “I just dropped my
belt down the commode.”
“What’s the red mark on your forehead?”
“T hit it on the doorknob.”
“What were you doing down there?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

43
 Erma Bombeck

There should be a label in jumpsuits that shows a

glass of water with an X through it.
Actually, the bus ride in between the touring is
rather relaxing. There is a myth that guided tours are a
piece of cake—nothing to do but wait for your travel
guide to count the luggage, open doors for you, and
pass out tickets to your next adventure. That’s not true.
We have a lot to do.
To begin with, we have to remember our bus num-
ber. On a twenty-one-day tour, you could average thirty-
five buses, each from a different country and each with a
different driver. 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.
Today, we are on a German bus with an Italian
driver. He is the first foreigner we’ve seen close up since
we left home. Mary Jo got his autograph and picture.
His English is spoken like a recording. “My name is
Luigi,” he says into a microphone that is inches from his
teeth. “Remember that and remember your bus num-
ber. It is 1084725. Keep your feet out of the aisles, do
not smoke, do not leave valuables on the bus, keep the
windows closed, have the correct change for the
restrooms, do not bring food aboard, and remember, if
you miss your bus, you must return to your hotel at your
own expense. If you have a good time, you may tip as
you leave.”
Remembering your guide is also taxing. You cannot

44
 Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

drift for a minute. Although Mr. Duval is our main

guide, we pick up local ones to provide information on
what we are seeing. The women guides usually carry
umbrellas, plastic flowers, or brightly colored scarfs so
we can follow them easily. Male guides try to lose us.
Mr. Duval announces every evening that we must
have our luggage outside our hotel doors by five A.M.
Never at nine or ten, but at a time when we are asleep.
Sometimes, as I drag it out into the hall, my husband’s
hand is still in his valise attached to clean underwear.
This sounds ludicrous, but if it weren’t for Mary Jo
and her copious notes, no one would know what coun-
try we’re in.
As the bus slows down, the Whiners peer anxiously
out of the window. “I knew it,” says Bud, “another fac-
tory. We didn’t pay all of this money to come to a bunch
of tourist traps.”
I hated to admit it, but Bud had a point. Our sight-
seeing did seem to be a bit out of balance. We were
allowed fifteen minutes to view the Book of Kells in
Ireland and an hour and a half to shop in a sweater fac-
tory. We spent twenty minutes touring the Tower of
London and two hours in an English bone china factory.
We saw Anne Frank’s house when the bus slowed down
but spent halfa day in Holland’s Delft factory. Add to
that the jewelry factory in Austria, the Murano glass fac-
tory in Italy, the lace factory in Belgium, and the watch
factory in Switzerland, and we were pretty burned out.
This was a wood carving factory. We all filed off the

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 Erma Bombeck

bus to Luigi’s warning, “Remember, your bus number is

1084725. Take your time.”
The factories are all the same. There is a small
room the size of a coffee table where an artisan sits on a
stool with the product in front of him. This craftsman
was chipping away on a bust of Elvis. A guide quickly
explains the process. Seconds later, we are herded
through two double doors to a room the size of
Connecticut. Every three feet along the rows of glass
counters displaying hand-carved dogs and tableaus of
the Crucifixion is a salesperson with an order book who
speaks English like a Harvard professor.
Having never traveled extensively before, I was sur-
prised at how many cathedrals we could visit in one day.
The first church we toured was truly a spiritual experi-
ence. As I shuffled down the aisle and gawked toward
the ceiling, I clung hungrily to every word about the
church that came from the guide’s lips. Then when I
could absorb no more, I wrote it all down in a notebook.
I was desperate to know how long it took to build it,
how many bricks were used, what year it was struck by
lightning, when the east wing was added, the time it
took to install the organ, how many trees were cut down
to make the pews, how many men died cutting the trees,
how many gallons of gold leaf were used on the ceiling
alone, and how many miles of scaffolding were needed
to restore it. I duly recorded what heads of state were
buried from there and in what city the bells were cast. I
think one day I actually pushed “Where’s Mr.

46
 Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

Babcock?” into a water font to get closer to the guide.

After forty or fifty cathedrals, I began to glaze over
and became quite preoccupied. When souvenir church
bulletins were passed out in a basilica somewhere, I
wrapped my gum in mine. Later, when the guide asked,
“Any questions?” I asked how many cathedrals could
you see in one day before you slipped into a coma.
Near the end of the trip, St. Paul’s began to look
like St. John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore looked
suspiciously like St. Mark’s. I began noticing saints with
bad skin, chipped noses, and missing fingers. I really
began to worry about myself when I nudged my hus-
band, nodded toward a statue of St. Cecelia, and said,
“Be honest. Is that Lee Marvin’s twin or what!”
Eventually, it got to the point where it would have
taken Robert Redford saying Mass to get me off the bus.
As the death march progressed, other things began
to bother me. My twelve-piece basic ensemble that
could make a hundred thirty-five combinations was
beginning to break down. The breast pocket on the
jacket ripped and I could only wear it with my arms
folded. A scarf faded on my only blouse, forcing me to
wear it with the darts facing backwards. The T-shirt
shrunk. I bought another cap with a bill and made an
interesting bra to wear around the pool.
I had outgrown my slacks in London... or was it
Rome? -
We were all getting testy. The moment my husband
hit a hotel room, he unpacked like we had just closed on

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 Erma Bombeck

escrow for the building. Every suitcase was emptied into

drawers and closets. . . if only for a night. Then he
began his laundry. The sun could be setting over the
Matterhorn. A carnival could fill the streets of Florence.
The Tour de France winner could be coming over the
finish line outside our hotel window. He did his laundry.
I was also sick of lugging around his stupid tripod.
A perfect stranger approached me one day in Harrods,
pointed to the permanent indentation on my jumpsuit,
and said, “I see you travel with a tripod.”
Probably the biggest downside to group tour travel
is that for twenty-one days, sixteen hours a day, you are
with other Americans. God forbid you should rub
shoulders with an Austrian, German, Frenchman,
Swiss, Italian, Irishman, Belgian, Englishman, or
Dutchman. You wait in hotel lobbies with groups of
other Americans waiting for their tour buses. You visit
shrines where all the buses that unload are carrying
other Americans. You eat with one another at long
tables that cater to Americans and are sequestered in
private dining rooms like juries.
Guides tell you American jokes in English. You are
dropped off at souvenir shops that sell T-shirts with the
Chicago Bulls stamped on them. When you go to a cir-
cus or the theater, you are set off in a section reserved
for American tourists. In three weeks, the closest we
ever got to a foreigner was Lil’s Irish dog.
The bus rolled on and the twenty-first day found us
gathered on the second terrace of the world-famous

48
 Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

Eiffel Tower for the obligatory gala farewell party.

I looked at this group of people whom I had seen
more often than my mother and had more intimacy with
than my gynecologist. We had shared some extraordi-
nary moments together.
We had dined in a castle at a medieval banquet in
Ireland. (Ben Everywhere observed the Samoun
Fumme was cold and Wortes-Sallet-Ton-Tressis was
tougher than he remembered.)
We had seen the Pope standing in his window wav-
ing from St. Peter’s Square. (The Whiners said they
didn’t believe it was really him. They saw someone push
a start button in his back.)
Mary Jo and her mother had yodeled on stage at
the Swiss Night Out party in Lucerne. We had been to
the London Palladium and the Sistine Chapel.
As we sipped the complimentary French wine, my
husband started to butter his hard roll. Suddenly he
jumped to his feet and dramatically hoisted the roll over
his head like Kunta Kinte offering up his newborn son.
“T knew it!” he shouted. “It’s my roll from Dublin. Here
are my initials and the date!”
The Whiners said they weren’t surprised.
The Everywheres looked bored and told him to sit
down.
“Where’s Mr. Babcock?” blinded him with his flash
as he captured the moment on film.
Mary Jo and her mother declared it a miracle.
Mr. Murchison offered a toast and a fast chorus of

49
 Erma Bombeck

“Mademoiselle from Armentieres, Parlez Vous.”

The Health Fairy warned, “Don’t eat it. It will
make you gassy.”

When we arrived home, I set fire to my travel

clothes. To me, they had the same symbolism as mater-
nity clothes. Get rid of them and you would never have
to go through the experience again.
The tour was a nice smorgasbord of Europe, but
we felt constricted by time schedules and bound by an
itinerary where people hovered over you as if you were
an endangered species during mating season.
After the guided tour experience, we fantasized
about renting a car and taking off all by ourselves. In our
dreams, we imagined the two of us immersed in a little
red sports car like two lovers in a hot tub. We visualized
the wind blowing our hair as we discovered quaint little
inns on dirt roads. We paused on a mountaintop to
drink wine and toast the breathless view.
“We could set our own pace,” I said to my hus-
band. “No stress ... no tour buses . . . no guides.”
“You're right,” he said.
“No luggage outside the room by five A.M., no table
for twenty at lunch, no more major decisions of ‘Do I
use my fifteen minutes to tour the Louvre or go to the
restroom?”
In retrospect, it sounded so simple. If you could
drive a car, you could drive a rental car in another coun-
try, right?
Right.

50
 The Rental Car

We were stopped for a traffic light at the mall one

afternoon when one of our kids noted that the car in
front of us had his windshield wipers on even though the
sun was shining. He was also trying to make a left-hand
turn from the center lane.
“Is he crazy or what?” giggled my son.
I grabbed the kid by the collar and put my face
close to his. “Listen up, mister! I never want to hear you
use that tone again, do you understand me? Look at the
plates. That poor unfortunate that you have deemed to
call crazy is driving a rental car. Do you know what that
means? It means he has a road map that looks like the

51
 Erma Bombeck

veins in the back of my knees and he was lucky to find

his way out of the airport. He is in a car that he has
never seen before and is looking for his route signs that
are hidden somewhere behind a tree. There are fifteen
pieces of luggage jammed into that compact because
they didn’t have the station wagon he ordered. The poor
devil will never find out how to turn on the lights when
it gets dark so he will have to drive until his battery dies.
If he’s real lucky, he will find the button that releases the
key in his ignition. If he doesn’t he will have to spend
the night in the car. Don’t you ever talk that way about a
person driving a rental car again!”
My son looked at me and said softly, “It’s Italy
again, isn’t it, Mom?”

a2
 Italy

The Italian behind the car rental desk in Naples

boredly drew a circle around a large X and said, “You are
here.” Then he outlined an artery on the map with a yel-
low pen and continued, “Just turn right at the first—”
“We're where?” asked my husband, leaning over for
a closer look.
“Here,” he repeated, stabbing the map with his pen.
“But ‘here’ is in the margin,” I interrupted. “How
do we get onto the map?”
“It is simple, madam.” He sighed. “Take the Via
Don to Foria and follow the Piazza Cavour to Via
Roma. Look for the Piazza Medaglia d’Oro off Via

53
 Erma Bombeck

Giotto Menzinger and follow the signs. You can’t

miss it.”
It had all sounded so romantic. We’d pop over to
Italy, rent a car, and wind around the Amalfi Drive, tak-
ing in Positano and Ravello and perhaps zip over to
Capri. We certainly didn’t need a guide for that!
Besides, driving in Italy wouldn’t be like driving in
Ireland. That had been a nightmare. From the moment
my husband eased himself into the driver’s seat at
Shannon, he sensed something was wrong. “Where’s
my steering wheel?” he asked.
“Vvergot ite) saidat It’s on my side.”
Carefully, he eased his body over the gearshift and
into the seat. He started the motor and inched his way
onto the highway where he nearly met another car head
on. After two more close calls, we realized everyone was
driving his car on the wrong (left) side of the road. I’m
here to tell you we have lived life in the fast lane and life
in the slow lane, but until you’ve spent a few weeks in
the wrong lane, you have nothing to talk about.
It was terrifying for my husband. Every time a car
approached, he came to a dead stop and closed his eyes
until it passed. When he tried to turn on the lights, he
released the hood. When he thought he was shifting
gears with his right hand, he opened his own door.
When he attempted to enter a lane of traffic, he looked
for traffic the wrong way. In the entire two weeks we
toured the country, we never passed another car, never
put the car in reverse, never parallel parked or made a

54
 Italy

left-hand turn . . . make that right-hand turn.

As a passenger, it was no day at the beach for me
either. Each time we passed a person walking, I sucked
in my breath and made a whimpering noise. When my
husband asked me not to do that, I informed him I had
been flogged to death by tree branches, drenched by
gutter and curb water, mooned by sheep, and seen fear
in the eyes of pedestrians that would haunt me for the
rest of my life.
For months after we returned home from Ireland, I
had nightmares about the “roundabouts”—the Irish’s
answer to a samurai cloverleaf. No wonder the country
boasts such religious fervor. There are probably more
instant conversions to the faith on a roundabout than on
death row.
What it is is a circle with four lanes of traffic going
in the same direction, with six or seven exits and
entrances feeding into it. Once you enter the round-
about, cars zip in and out in front of you at blurring
speeds. Everyone in the car takes a vow of silence while
you are entering and exiting the roundabout. We once
spent a half day on one.
Before leaving the Italian car rental counter, I
asked, “Italians do drive on the right side of the road,
don’t they?” For the first time, the agent smiled and
said, “Of course. You will have no problem in Naples.
Just be sure to put all your belongings in the trunk and
out of sight, including your handbag. Scoundrels, you
know.”

55
 Erma Bombeck

It was not the first time we had heard of crime in

some of the larger European cities. Handbags were
reportedly ripped from your shoulders by “scoundrels”
on motor scooters. Gypsy “scoundrel” children sur-
rounded you as you walked. When they disappeared,
your wallet and valuables went with them. There was
talk that windows on your car were smashed as you
stopped for a traffic light and your luggage was rerouted.
We made a vow to be careful.
The two-seater sports car we had ordered turned
out to be a station wagon that was less than user-friend-
ly. The motor didn’t purr. It made human sounds in
Italian. When you slammed the door, the radio went on.
The reverse gear was one of the best-kept secrets since
the formula for rocket fuel. Once the key was inserted
in the ignition, there was no way to remove it. We cir-
cled the airport for thirty minutes before we finally
stumbled onto the Via Don.
To tell you how long it took us to find our hotel
would have no meaning for anyone in hours. As a frame
of reference, I will simply tell you that Susan Butcher
covered 1,158 miles from Anchorage to Nome in eleven
days, one hour, fifty-three minutes, and twenty-three
seconds to win the Iditarod. She was in deep snow and
freezing conditions on a sled being pulled by a team of
dogs at the time.
It took us five hours and thirty-three minutes to
cover twenty miles to our hotel in a Fiat.
Naples traffic isn’t a condition. It’s a war in

56
 Italy

progress. There are eight to ten lanes of traffic all going

on an accelerated treadmill to oblivion. Red lights flash,
but no one stops. Green lights flash, but no one cares.
Cars cut in and out in front of you and never exit any-
where. New ones just keep feeding into the traffic. The
street signs are all in (what else?) Italian, straining to the
limits my entire Italian vocabulary, which consists of
“antipasto” and “Joe Garagiola.”
“How do those people survive as pedestrians?” I
asked my husband.
“They were born right there on the sidewalk,” he
snarled.
As darkness approached and we were still driving
around Naples, panic set in. Soon we would have to
turn on the car lights, and then what would we do? We
were afraid to touch anything in the car. We might even
be faced with running out of gas. In that traffic, how
long would it be before someone even noticed we
weren’t moving under our own steam, but were being
pushed along with the traffic? One year? Two?
As we sped down the wrong way on a one-way
street, a bus approached. My husband swerved off into a
dark alley to miss getting hit head-on. We sat there for a
moment in the darkness before my husband noticed a
glow of a dozen or so cigarettes behind the car. They
belonged to a group of young men leaning on motorcy-
cles. In my heart I knew they had “scoundrel” written
all over their bodies.
Angrily, my husband opened his door and said,

a7
 Erma Bombeck

“I’m going to tell them we’re tourists and we’re lost.”

I grabbed his arm. “No matter what the outcome of
this evening is,” I said, “I just wanted you to know that
this is the stupidest thing you have ever done in your
entire life.”
‘Looks whe ssaidss dadon ascaresifethey,tesP eter
Fonda and Dennis Hopper. We’ve got to find the
hotel.”
After a few minutes of conversation, one of the
young men climbed into the front seat of the car with
my husband. I was told to get in the rear seat. Another
young man climbed on his bike and motioned for us to
follow. Together, they delivered us to the doors of our
hotel. When we tried to pay them, they refused and told
us to have a nice stay in Naples... and be careful with
our cameras and handbags. There were scoundrels
about.
I tell this story for two reasons. First, because it’s
the kind of story you never hear about—the nice people
on your travels who are glad you have come to their
country and want to show it off. Second, it marks the
only time I can remember that my husband admitted to
being lost.
By the time we crawled into bed that night, we
knew what we had to do. We were going to put our
rental car in a garage somewhere and hire a driver to
take us to Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius.
That’s when we met Frank. Frank was a concierge
at the hotel who had a way of conducting business with

58
 Italy

you and painting the lobby with his eyes at the same
time. We asked him if he knew of a driver who would
not only be knowledgeable, but who spoke English.
Frank shrugged. “No problem. I get you good driv-
er who speaks English better than you do.” Frank made
a phone call. We tipped him.
If Henry Kissinger had been Italian and had a lip
full of Novocain, he would have sounded like the driver
Frank got for us. His name was Rocco. We asked Rocco
if he had been called often by Frank to serve as a
guide/driver for English-speaking tourists. He said, “Oh
sure, he’s my brother.”
We had the feeling when we tipped Rocco, we
tipped Frank again.
Someone told us that Naples has the best pizza in
the world. Where do you find the best pizza in Naples?
You silly goose. You ask Frank. Frank said, “No prob-
lem,” he would make reservations for us that night. He
made a phone call. We tipped him.
Later that night as we walked into the restaurant, a
familiar face approached us with the menus. It was
Frank. He owned the restaurant and worked there on
his nights off from the hotel. We left a tip for the pizza
and Frank.
We were to discover in the next few days that Frank
had relatives who ran “best jewelry factory in Naples”
and a brother-in-law with “best laundry” in all of Italy. I
knew in my heart that in a few years, Frank would have
enough in tips for a down payment on his own country.

59
 Erma Bombeck

Watching state-of-the-art nepotism was fun, but we

had to push on to the drive down the Amalfi coast. Both
of us were apprehensive as we stared at the rented Fiat
sitting at the curb.
“Is it pointed in the direction of the autostrada?”
asked my husband. (The autostrada is the Italian ver-
sion of an expressway.)
“No problem,” said Frank. “You go down and
make a left and at the first turnoff a pee and you are
there. Then you get off at Amalfi exit.’
We tipped him.
We couldn’t believe that something had worked
out right. The autostrada was exactly where Frank
said it would be. We stopped at the toll booth, gave
them a chunk of lire, and watched for our exit.
When we arrived at the toll booth at the other end,
it was obvious we had overshot the Amalfi exit, so
we paid another chunk oflire to get back on and go
the other way.
When we once again reached our original toll
booth, we realized we had missed it again. My husband
said maybe you could only exit going one way, so we
paid another toll and got back on.
At the other end as we forked out our fourth toll, I
said, “This is ridiculous; I’m going to ask.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “It’s here. We’re just not
seeing it. Pay attention this time.”
I yelled out of the window, “Where’s the Amalfi
exit?”

60
 Italy

The man in the toll booth yelled back, “It’s called

Maiori!”
In Positano as we stopped for a light, a large group
of tourists walked in front of us to board their tour bus.
One of them yelled at my husband, “Your windshield
wipers are on.”
“T know,” shouted my husband. “I’m making a left-
hand turn.” The man stared at us for a minute and then
walked on.
“T thought you released your hood when you want-
ed to turn left,” I said.
“T release the hood when I want to turn right.”
I looked over my shoulder as the group boarded
their tour bus—and was filled with envy.

61
 Tipping

Tipping has become as mechanical to Americans as

swatting a fly buzzing around the potato salad. Foreigners
tell us we are responsible for the decadent bit of capital-
ism that turns Boy Scouts into money-grubbing urchins.
They contend many countries with people pledged to
give good service on the basis of pride have been cor-
rupted by the American dollar. This is probably true.
I remember one New Year’s Eve we hired a
babysitter to watch our children. The teenager invited
in a few friends for a party, broke a gin bottle in our
fireplace, burned a hole in the family room rug, locked
the kids in their rooms, and threw up on our sofa,

62
 Tipping

which had to be re-covered at some expense.

My husband tipped her five dollars because it was
New Year’s Eve and she had stayed after midnight.
It’s a habit we cannot leave home without.
We have tipped waiters who removed a cat from the
table where we were eating. We have tipped cabdrivers
who nearly orphaned our children. We have rewarded
curbside porters for holding our luggage at the curb as
our plane took off.
Americans do pay for the strangest services. During
the years I have been traveling, I have paid possibly
$700 (and that’s a conservative figure) to get back my
garment bag that originally cost $60. On the occasions
that I wanted to carry it myself, it was literally ripped
from my hands. Unfortunately, the IRS does not con-
sider this garment bag a dependent. It should.
In one trip alone, I paid to have it checked in at curb-
side, rescued from the top of a carousel by a skycap, put
into the trunk of a waiting cab, picked up by a hotel bell-
man who dropped it into the hands of another bellman
who finally deposited it in my room. At this point, I invest-
ed more in tips than the contents of the bag were worth.
Small wonder President Carter carried his own luggage.
In some places, tipping is a major industry. Take
Haiti. If you plan to ride a mule to the mountaintop
fortress of Henri Christophe’s Citadel, you will never be
lonely. :
There are twenty or thirty mules at the bottom of
the historic climb for tourists. There are also three hun-

63
 Erma Bombeck

dred unemployed children ready to help the tourists.

There is a child to assist you in getting on the mule,
another child to put his hand on the left side of the
reins, and another to put his hand on the right side of
the reins. There is another optimistic child who places
his hand on your buttock to keep you from falling off the
mule and another one with a switch who whacks the
mule when it pauses to pass out. This quintet of chil-
dren will stick to you like ugly wallpaper for the entire
trip up and down the mountain and will not leave you
until you reward them for their vigil. If you are carrying
a camera bag, purse, and raincoat, prepare to hire an
accountant to handle the payroll.
As far as I’m concerned, tipping comes with the
territory. How can I complain when I used to give my
kids an allowance for breathing? It’s the American way.
In Las Vegas, tipping is state of the art. Never have so
few done so little and gotten so much. One night we
went to a casino showroom to see “Frank” and bought
our tickets. The tickets got us inside the door. No far-
ther. A man in a black tuxedo surveyed the empty room
and said, “There is nothing any closer.” My husband
gave him five dollars and his vision improved. He spot-
ted a table six feet from where we were standing.
I still couldn’t make out the stage. I looked at the
second maitre d’ and told him I had sold blood to get
here. His expression never changed. My husband tipped
him and we passed on to the third maitre d’ another six
feet away.

64
 Tipping

This went on for fifteen minutes. Thirty dollars

later, we were seated at a long table straight out of a
VFW lodge. To view the stage we had to turn our heads
into a locked position for one hour. Frank sat on a
crummy stool. I figured he didn’t tip.
It is reasonable to recognize good service, but one
practice in most foreign countries is unforgivable. You
must pay for the privilege of using a restroom before you
set foot in it. ’m pushing for the Worldwide Freedom
Potty Act that should be a part of the Geneva
Convention, the Treaty of Versailles, and all those doc-
uments that grant everyone the right of a facility when
the need arises.
“Surely,” I told my husband, “there is someplace
where you can go without wearing a money changer
around your waist... a Shangri-la where smiles come
easily . . . a magical place where people pamper and
hover over you because they just want you to be happy.”

65
 Cruising the Baltic

It was another one of those predictable evenings.

By eight-thirty we were in our nightclothes, semiprone
in our matching Barcalounger recliners, watching ani-
mals mate on PBS.
As we were searching for a special on “The
Monogamous Manatee,” the screen filled with Kathie Lee
Gifford bopping around a cruise ship singing, “Eatin’ what
you want and doin’ what you choose.” Everyone around
her was half sick from happiness.
My husband observed, “Look at that! All that water
and not one person has a line in.”
You know how you can’t get a song out of your

66
 Cruising the Baltic

mind? For the next three days I went around singing

“Fatin’ what you want and doin’ what you choose.” For
a long time I had wondered what kind of people we’d be
away from the daily routine of sorting socks and filling
up ice cube trays. We had taken vacations, but they
always ended up somewhere between a church camp
and elective surgery. What would it be like to live in ele-
gance for a couple of weeks? To sweep into a dining
room in a long gown or strike up a conversation at a
ship’s railing with a mysterious stranger wearing an
ascot?
I had seen enough episodes of “The Love Boat” to
know that no one came off a cruise ship the same person
as when he boarded one. I looked upon it as a Club
Bed, so to speak, with everyone dressing up each
evening like he was going to the prom, throwing confetti
at one another, and drinking champagne out of glasses
that didn’t smell like creme rinse.
“How do you feel about an adventure on water?” I
whispered softly to my husband one night.
“Did your contacts fall down the commode again?”
“I’m talking about a cruise. We need a cruise.”
“Why?”
“Because we are in a rut. We need some romance in
our lives.”
“And a cruise is going to make the difference,” he
said flatly. :
“Evelyn Grimshaw told me that lovemaking burns
a hundred and twenty-five calories. She and Dan came

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home from the Caribbean and both looked absolutely

anorexic.”
“If you believe that,” he said, “you believe that
Gilligan set out on a three-hour trip from Hawaii with
enough luggage to last Lovey and Thurston Howell III
and Ginger for seven seasons.”
“With cork luggage? It could happen,” I said stub-
bornly.
After a couple of months of serious whining, I final-
ly convinced him that a cruise would be a relaxing vaca-
tion for both of us. There would be no packing and
unpacking clothes, no on and off buses, no road maps or
rental cars, delayed airline flights or pesky tipping. For
one-price-pays-all, we could just relax and rediscover
one another.
We booked passage on a Norwegian ship leaving
Copenhagen. For two weeks we would cruise through
the fjords of Norway before returning to port. On the
second two-week leg, we’d visit Sweden, Finland,
Germany, and Russia, for a total of one month.
From the moment we stepped across the gangplank
at Copenhagen, I experienced a feeling I had not had
before . . . acute insecurity. I really couldn’t explain it. As
I looked around at the elegance and the efficiency, I knew
that my husband and I were the only two people left on
the planet who had never been on a cruise ship before.
Everyone was richer, thinner, and smarter than us.
I knew in my heart they carried passports dog-eared
from use, had new underwear and old money. Face it,

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 Cruising the Baltic

we were the only couple aboard who paid for the trip
with a credit union check and carried borrowed luggage
full of borrowed clothes that carried a warning, “Sweat
in it and you clean it.” Not a word was spoken, but
everyone I talked to had signed up for the nine P.M. din-
ner seating. I knew we would be the only two peasants
eating alone at seven in that huge dining room.
Romance was going to be a challenge. Especially
when you’re married to a man who lists dressing up
every night right up there with a root canal. Not to men-
tion the downside of washing out his only ruffled
evening shirt every night in the basin and hanging it in
the shower to dry.
Then there was the motion problem. When I threw
up in a standing ashtray filled with sand just outside the
dining room before we left the dock, I knew we would
never whisper anything in one another’s ear except,
“Get me a cold towel.”
The ship was commanded by Captain Gunther,
whose English was limited. All he ever said to me was,
“IT am Norwegian. There is no immediate danger.” He
always smiled when he said it.
I have to admit the first couple of days aboard the
floating cookie were special. The fjords were stunning,
the Norwegian people were a delight, and I was begin-
ning to get over my low self-esteem. Also, we could still
zip up our clothes. Life doesn’t get any better than that.
However, by the time we made port at Tromsg, the
capital of the Arctic, I bought maternity underwear. My

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clothes were getting a little snug and the cabin seemed

to be closing in on us. Every time we turned around we
kept bumping into each other. Actually, we were closing
in on it.
One day at lunch, I said to my husband, “Why are you
wearing a life preserver?” He said, “I’m not. That’s me.”
As the lazy days wore on, there was a rush at the
gift shop for the racks of Diane Freis dresses. (This is a
designer who specializes in dresses that are wildly color-
ful, never wrinkle, are one-size-fits-all, and have elastic
waistbands.) On the day we docked at Bergen to watch
a group of Norwegian folk dancers, more than a dozen
of us wore them ashore. We looked like the next act.
Late one night as the alarm by the bed went off, my
husband turned sleepily and asked, “Is it morning
already?”
“Get up,” I ordered. “It’s time for the midnight
buffet on the promenade deck. They’re serving Scarlet
Ox Tongue in Jelly and Vendolhoo Indian Lamb
Curny#i
He swung his feet to the side of his bed and rubbed
his eyes. “Again!” he snapped. “Why can’t they just
serve plain old Roast Cornish Hen Montmorency or
Cretan Potatoes?” As he pulled on his sweats, he con-
tinued, “This has got to stop.”
“What has got to stop?”
“How many meals are we eating a day?”
“Seventeen... eighteen, tops,” I said defensively.
“Is that a problem?”

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 Cruising the Baltic

“If we keep this up, we’ll have our own zip code.”
“At the éarly bird, all we have is a roll and coffee.”
“Followed by an eight-course breakfast,” he added.
“No one forces you to have a bouillon break just
before lunch.”
“Who had a gun at your head for the tea with the
sandwiches and cookies?” he countered.
“It wasn’t me who pigged out at the happy hour
with all those hot canapés and hors d’oeuvres.”
“And I didn’t see it ruining your dinner... or the
pizza party or the predawn breakfast afterward.”
“Look,” I said, “if you think I’m gaining weight,
just say so.”
“Let me put it this way. If someone wants to show
home movies, all you have to do is wear white slacks and
bend over.”
He slammed out of the stateroom.
I looked in the mirror. He was right. I was begin-
ning to dress like the Statue of Liberty. I held out my
arms and fanned the skin that hung like a stage curtain.
It was only a matter of time before fourteen tourists
would fit in my arm. I couldn’t go home like this.
When I joined him at the buffet, I had a plan. From
here on in, we would take advantage of all the activities
aboard the ship and maybe work off some of the food.
He agreed.
If there’s anything a cruise ship does and does well,
it keeps you busy. And they certainly have the staff for it.
When I went to Fitness on the Fantail with Jennifer, my

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 Erma Bombeck

husband went to the library with Carole for the ship’s

daily quiz. When I learned how to make rosettes out of
radishes with Chef Andre, my husband was in a shuffle-
board tournament with Bruce. I danced the tango with
Fern and Phillipe. He practiced golf swings with Phil.
I wanted him to tour the bridge one afternoon with
Captain Gunther, but he was busy playing bingo with
Hal and Barbara.
We were like two ships passing one another in the
dark. When he was at table tennis with Sibyl and the
gang, I was doing calligraphy with Lotus Flower. He
went off trapshooting with Hank while I played bridge.
One night when I joined Debbie Sunshine at the
piano in the Mediterranean Lounge, I met my husband
by chance. “I miss you,” I said.
“Me too,” he responded.
“T won at bingo today,” I said.
“You want to go to the casino?”
“T’d love to,” I said, “but I have a rehearsal. The
passengers are doing The Sound of Music. I’m one of
the nuns.”
“Perfect casting,” he snapped and walked away.
We rarely saw each other, but one night as I
whipped into the stateroom from my needlepoint class,
my husband was stretched out on the bed. I asked him
what he was doing in the room.
“I’m exhausted,” he said. “Do you suppose that
for one night I wouldn’t have to put on a tuxedo and
tie and go to the dining room and eat shrimp out of

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 Cruising the Baltic

a carved ice swan and dance until one A.M.?”

I sat on the bed beside him. “Tonight you can for-
get the tux,” I said softly. “This is the evening of the
ship’s costume party, remember? Everyone is supposed
to appear in a costume made from stuff you have on
hand.”
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“Not to worry. I have a costume for you. You are
going to wear my green tights and green aerobics leotard
and go as a zucchini.”
By the time we returned to Copenhagen, we were
barely speaking to each other. Familiarity did not breed
children as Mark Twain once remarked. It bred irritabil-
ity and sniping. We were sluggish from carrying around
extra pounds and exhausted from all that leisure.
The last night at sea before we docked, we both sat
stiffly at the captain’s table and sipped the complimenta-
ry wine provided with our dinner.
I looked around the table. All of us had talked one
another to death. We had eaten at least one hundred
and ninety-six meals with these people. We had heard all
their stories, relived their travels, laughed at their jokes,
and perused their brag albums of grandchildren. We had
spent more time with them on buses and land tours
than we had with our families. The cruise crowd didn’t
have the same staple manifest as the guided tour, but
there were stereotypes.
There was Edith Purge, the dessert queen. She was
traveling alone, and because she ate everything that

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didn’t attack her first, she wore caftans to bed. Her phi-
losophy was, “You’re paying through the nose for all of
this, honey, so you might just as well eat it.” When the
maitre d’ asked if she wanted the seven or the nine
o’clock dinner seating, she answered, “Yes.” She took
three rolls of film one day—all of the dessert table.
There were the Tweeds, a no-nonsense couple
from Maine. They were both into fitness and felt their
mission in life was to ruin your appreciation of food. I
can’t enjoy a hot dog today without thinking of their
pig-lips lecture. Every morning at six the Tweeds hit the
decks, and heaven help anyone who interfered with their
brisk, goose-stepping walk.
The Borings, Winston and Charlotte, appeared
every evening like they were shot full of Novocain. The
only time they spoke was to drop another name of a
country they had traveled. They had been to all the
African nations before the name changes and were the
only couple at the table who knew how to wield a fish
knife. That appeared to be their only talent.
The Craigs were an interesting couple. He drank
and she changed clothes eight or ten times a day. One
night I noted a seasickness patch behind her ear. I swear
it had a G for Gucci on it. We get a Christmas card from
them every year. Our name is misspelled.
At the farewell dinner, Captain Gunther sum-
moned our wine steward, who brought a bottle of aqua-
vit to the table. The steward explained it was a strong
Norwegian drink. You slug down a shot of it and chase

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 Cruising the Baltic

it with a sip of beer. Two of them, he said, and you

would forget who you came with. The captain had
slugged down the first round when I leaned over and
said, “I read where you weren’t supposed to mix wine
with aquavit.”
The captain looked at me blankly, then broke into a
smile. “I am Norwegian. There is no immediate danger.”
My father always said, “There’s no such thing as a
free lunch.” I figured what did he know. My father
never went on a cruise ship where he ate fifteen meals a
day without so much as dropping a single dime under
the plate. He never had people fluffing up his pillow,
taking an empty glass out of his hand, putting up a deck
chair for him without a palm extended. Everything was
included in the package.
On the last day aboard the cruise ship, I realized my
father was right. There is a moment when you have to
pay the piper for letting you dance around the decks
without a checkbook.
Just before you make port, you are encouraged to
show your appreciation to all those people who
befriended you.
You leave a tip for the deck chair steward who raced
to open your chair every morning, for the towel steward
who stood around like a midwife waiting to wipe beads
of perspiration from your forehead, and for the cocktail
steward who brought
you liquids stuck to a little napkin.
You put a little something in an envelope for the
maitre d’ who showed you to your table each evening,

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 Erma Bombeck

to the wine steward who helped you select “some-

thing fruity but not pretentious,” and to your waiter
who remembered your name from day one... sucha
nice boy.
You tip the bread server and the busboy, the lug-
gage handler and the bartender, your favorite cocktail
waitress and the girl singer with the band who led the
group singing “Happy Birthday.”
You tip the young girl who turned down your bed
and the one who made it and cleaned the room each
day. You tip the beautician who did your hair and the
room steward who served you dinner in your room sev-
eral nights and the croupier in the casino.
As my husband returned his flat wallet to his pock-
et, he said, “I hope we have enough left for cab fare
home.”
“Look at it this way,” I said.“It took two inches off
your hips.”

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 Shopping

Everyone has role models.

Mine is a dream team of shoppers who have become
known as the Four Horsemen of the National Shopping
League (NSL):

Imelda Marcos, formerly of the Philippines

Nancy Reagan, United States
Michele Duvalier, Haiti
Jacqueline Onassis, United States

I tell you there is nothing that gets my heart beating

faster than to watch a team of shoppers who are physi-

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 Erma Bombeck

cally fit, mentally alert, and professionally trained put

their talents to work in the store aisles.
We’re not talking amateurs here who play in the
Discount Bowls and fumble around fifteen minutes to
read price tags. No siree, we’re talking world-class com-
petitors who spend $10,430 on bed sheets in one day
and who buy two hundred twenty place settings of dish-
es at $952 a crack. They’re the stuff of which musicals
are made, where you come out of the theater humming,
“Don’t Cry for Me Valentino.”
It’s hard to break into the major shopping league. I
remember how Raisa Gorbachev caused a flap when she
dropped a few bucks on jewelry during a trip to London
a few years ago. Critics in the Soviet Union had a cow
claiming she was caught up in the decadence of western
ways.
The truth is Russian shoppers are a good two hun-
dred years behind the rest of the world. While they were
sitting over there stockpiling missiles and connecting
dots all over those floral print dresses, the rest of the
world was turning its technology toward malls and
major shopping emporiums.
London launched Harrods, Japan positioned Issey
Miyake, Hong Kong perfected a fabulous silk factory
called Kaiser Estates Phase I, and frankly, if I saw
Bergdorf-Goodman catalogs aimed toward my country
from the United States, I’d panic.
Have you ever seen a Russian woman make the
National Shopping League? No, and you won’t. I knew

78
 Shopping

Raisa was an amateur when she never thought to ask

herself, “Why isn’t Nancy Reagan going to Reykjavik?”
The answer should have been obvious. Why would any-
one go to a barren countryside that had never heard of
Adolfo?
My husband says he thinks I’m ready for the NSL,
but he just says that to make me feel good. The only
time I am challenged is when I go on vacation. I live by
a couple of standard rules.

1. Never buy anything that fits under an airline

seat.
2. Buy in haste. Repent in leisure. Face it, you’ll
never get this way again.
3. Most people back home will believe anything is
tasteful just so long as it comes from a foreign country.
It doesn’t hurt to leave foreign price tags on. (12 million
lire sounds impressive. They don’t know the exchange is
$3.39 in U.S. dollars.)
4. Never buy clothes in a country where the women
wear overcoats and cover their heads with babushkas.
5. Never ask, “Do I need this?” The answer is
always no.

Shopping for souvenirs is one of the few joys of

traveling for me. I will buy anything. Nothing is too
tacky for me to lug home. I have purchased key chains
made out of boar’s hair, tasteless T-shirts that read I
WENT TO NEW GUINEA AND NO ONE ATE ME, paper-

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 Erma Bombeck

weights with the Loch Ness monster in them, and, from

Mexico, a band of dipped-in-wax frogs with unbeliev-
able fear on their faces, playing musical instruments.
I have purchased coconuts with Indian faces, inflat-
ed blowfish, rugs with camel dung on them, little out-
houses with doors that fly open and reveal a moun-
taineer sitting on a one-holer reading a newspaper.
Also, Eskimos with candle wicks coming out of
their heads, tape measures in metric, and pillow tops
with the Kennedy brothers that glow in the dark.
I have seen travelers anguish over a $2 hermetically
sealed four-leaf clover like they’re buying a condo in
Florida. I look at it this way. This is a one-shot opportu-
nity, and if one day I can run across a bottle opener with
a picture of Mount Vesuvius on it in the stove drawer,
and it sparks a memory, it’s worth it.
In Istanbul, there is a giant spice market lined with
tubs of spices all bearing their identification—in
Turkish. I bought two pounds of a mound of green
stuff, thinking it was mint. It was henna.
Shopping is basically a game of wits. Especially in
Turkey, where every male citizen over the age of twelve
is a carpet salesman. They are like a film of dust that
settles over the country. In fact, there are so many of
them that when tourists see them coming, their only
defense is to hold a crucifix in front of them like they are
being confronted by Barnabas Collins and yell, “Back!
Back!” That is why they have some of the most creative
approaches I have ever seen.

80
 Shopping

The “911 to the rescue” approach

As you are standing on a street corner surrounded

by six carpet salesmen, a man will wave them all away in
Turkish and turn to you and say in perfect English,
“Aren’t they pests? I’m from America too. What state
are you from?” It doesn’t matter what state you give. He
has been there.
He will tell you he and his wife came to Turkey a
couple of years ago to live and will offer to buy you a
cup of coffee in friendship. The coffee will be served in a
(get outta here) carpet shop a few blocks from where
you are standing. He will tell you he is buying carpets
for a large firm in New York. If there’s anything you like
he can get you a good price. They ship.

The “trust me, I’m not selling carpets” approach

You are snapping a picture in the park when a

young man says, “That is a great camera. How much
you pay for it?” You shrug and give him some figure and
he opens up his billfold and says, “I’d like to buy it.”
You smile (big mistake) and say, “No, thank you.” He
follows you around for the next two days talking about it
until you finally say, “I really don’t want to sell my cam-
era. Goodbye.” Then he says, “Would you like to look
at my carpets? They’re better and cheaper than anyone
else’s.” They take American Express.

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 Erma Bombeck

The “blind date” approach

This is a popular one. The salesman will walk close

to you and say, “Parlez vous Frangais?” You shake your
head. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” You answer no. After he
hits every country in Rand McNally, he makes a stab at
English. Once you have a language in common, he will
stick to you like pantyhose in Phoenix in July ... telling
you how great his carpets are. He offers to lie on the
customs declaration.

The “thirst for knowledge” approach

By the side of the road will be a large Bedouin tent.

At the gate you will be met by a young man who speaks
English and is anxious to explain the customs of the
nomad tribes and the way they lived. It is no coinci-
dence that the floor is solid with wall-to-wall Turkish
carpets. From there, he will proceed to where the arti-
sans are dyeing wool using natural fibers. Next to them
are women in front of looms who are tying knots faster
than he can say “Come, look at the finished product in
our showroom.”
I bought a carpet. He said I had exquisite taste.

At one time I amassed so much junk that when I

went through customs the officer asked, “How long
have you been gone?”

82
 Shopping

“Three weeks,” I said.

“It’s impossible to buy all this stuff in three weeks.
Did you see any of the country?”
“What country?” I asked.
He waved me on.
There are few certainties when you travel. One of
them is that the moment you arrive in a foreign country,
the American dollar will fall like a stone.
We have never traveled anywhere where the
American dollar was strong. . . with the exception of
Mexico. Maybe it was firm when we left New York, but
by the time we got to our destination, $20 wouldn’t buy
us a newspaper.
We have paid $10 for a soft drink in Sweden and
$12 for a hamburger in Russia. For two bowls of soup
and two soft drinks in Japan, we forked over $42.
My husband reacts to all of this with the grimness
of Louis Rukeyser. I, on the other hand, am struck with
an unreal approach to it. Foreign currency seems like
Monopoly play money to me. I think nothing of drop-
ping a suitcase full of Italian lire for a cup of coffee.
Every country we have visited acts like its dollar is
king .. . until you go to turn it back in. Then the coun-
try doesn’t want it. No one wants its own money back
with the exception of Russia, who doesn’t want it back
so much as it doesn’t want the rubles out of its sight for
fear someone will find out how much they are really
worth.
My husband is never without one of those little cur-

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 Erma Bombeck

rency decoders. You just punch into it the current rate

of exchange, push a few buttons, and it lights up the
answer. .
I have my own system. I just drop the last three
zeros, divide by two, add my age (not the real one, but
the one that appears on my bio), and drop a decimal
point third from the right. It’s close enough.
When that fails, you just grab all the money you
own in your hands, hold it out, and let them take what
they want.
One should never let the fate of the U.S. dollar get
in the way of shopping. I don’t understand people who
can go abroad and come back with nothing to declare
but diarrhea. Bartering is an art form. In San Miguel de
Allende in Mexico, I saw a six-foot wooden statue of
Don Quixote that I figured would look great in our
courtyard.
“Cuanto?” I asked
The salesman wrote down $150.
I laughed and headed toward the door. He called
me back and wrote down $100. I began to hum and
pick lint off my dress. He kept writing until he got to
$77.
“Sold,” I said.
I paid a man down the street from the shop $42 to
crate it. I paid $120 to have it put on a train for Laredo,
Texas, and another $320 to have a truck bring it to my
doorstep. When people ask me how much I paid for it, I
only give the base price.

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 Shopping

Shopping is probably the most underrated contact

sport in the world. It’s especially challenging when
you’re in countries where the stores close for siestas, like
Spain, Mexico, or Greece. Most of these stores are open
only from ten until one. They reopen again from three
to five-thirty. You must shop quickly. I survive in this
frantic atmosphere only because I have no taste.
When shoppers fantasize, the streets of Hong Kong
is the place that comes to mind. The city is one giant
mall. We spent four days there dragging through miles
of stalls and acres of shops. I didn’t take time to eat or
sleep. At one time there was serious talk of a catheter as
biological functions were slowing me down. When I
returned home I had credit card burns on the palms of
both hands. Shopping in Hong Kong, purported to be
the Shopping Olympics, was fun, but where was the
challenge? Inquiring “Did you buy anything in Hong
Kong?” is like asking “Does the Pope work Sundays?”
At some point in my travels, I knew my shopping
skills would be tested. I felt I was ready.

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 South America

After flying twenty-three hundred miles across the

Pacific from Chile, it was a relief to see the small outline
of Rapa Nui—Easter Island—beneath us.
I had so looked forward to the trip to South America.
Everything I had read about it had only heightened my
enthusiasm: those heavenly wool ponchos in the market-
place that you could pick up for $6 ... stunning silver neck-
laces and earrings for a song . . . not to mention the
exquisite hand-embroidered blouses and sweaters that
I could give as Christmas gifts.
As we claimed our luggage on the tarmac, a chill
went through my body. I shrugged it off. I would feel

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 South America

better when we got into town... in the center of things.

But the feeling didn’t go away. As we rode by small clus-
ters of houses and an occasional grocery store, I whis-
pered to my husband, “There’s something strange
about this place.”
“I know.” He smiled. “I feel it too. No lush forests,
no tropical birds, no white beaches or dramatic water-
falls, no buildings of any stature, only the hollow winds
that whistle over this barren countryside and those
giant, mysterious stone men with vacant eyes rising
majestically out of the ground.”
“Why are you talking like Jacques Cousteau? Look
around you! Do you realize we have not seen one single
gift shop in this place? I am supposed to spend four days
on an island that has no gift shops?”
“How can you possibly be bored surrounded by all
of this symbolism and mystery?”
“Look at me,” I commanded. “Do you know what
you’re dealing with? You are looking at a shallow
woman who left while the Pope was saying Mass at St.
Peter’s in Rome to buy a splinter from the cross on
which Christ purportedly died, from a man in the
square wearing fifteen watches on his forearm.”
“Knowing you,” he said, “you’ll rise to the chal-
lenge™
I joined our tour group and rode around in the little
buses. I had no choice. We poked around caves, volca-
noes, and excavation sites where they were restoring
these monoliths, and I had to admit I was intrigued by it

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 Erma Bombeck

all. Some of the statues had been toppled and rested

facedown in the open areas. Some were still in caves
where work on them had been abandoned. Sometimes
there would be groupings of them. A few had cinder
hats, others had larger ears. But they all had several
things in common. They were huge, had no eyes, and
were a mystery to anthropologists who for years had
come to Easter Island in an attempt to piece together a
culture that had left few clues.
“You see,” said my husband, “I knew you’d be fas-
cinated by this place. I’ll bet you’ve even forgotten
about shopping.”
“T love this place,” I said, “but if I don’t find some-
thing to buy within the next twenty-four hours, I am
going to become physically ill.”
Down from our hotel (which had no gift shop) was
a large platform on which seven of these statues—about
sixty feet tall—faced away from the sea. They looked
like giant targets on the gun range of a police academy.
Since South Americans dine after ten o’clock at night, it
created a problem for me. I am asleep by nine-thirty at
night. So each evening at dusk I took a candy bar and
bag of potato chips and joined the Stone Seven.
As I dangled my feet from the stone pedestal, I
looked up at them, studied their expressionless faces,
and figured they alone held the secret of why Easter
Island had no gift shops. It probably had something to
do with a woman who gave them bad shells.
The next morning, I hung around the hotel and

88
 South America

asked one of the Easter Islanders where you could buy

souvenirs.
He reported there were many statues and much
jewelry made by the natives, but they would rather not
exchange their wares for money. He had my attention.
It seems Easter Island holds the distinction of being
the most remote spot on the face of the earth. Its closest
neighbor is Pitcairn Island, twelve hundred miles to the
west. Therefore, it is often cut off from basic supplies
needed to exist. Tourists fly in regularly from Chile, but
the cost of sending supplies by air is prohibitive. A ship
is scheduled to come twice a year, but they are at the
whim of rough seas, and supplies must often be trans-
ferred to smaller boats. The carvings could be had for a
box of aspirin, a pair of scissors, shampoo, or shoes.
I could handle that. I just had to know the rules.
That afternoon, I visited a man carving statues and
dropped to my knees as if I had just found the only crap
game in town.
Before we departed Easter Island, I had a suitcase
of beautiful wood carvings of the statues, some wonder-
ful jewelry, and several watercolors.
My husband left without his running shoes, shaving
cream, Swiss army knife, a pair of jeans, a cotton
pullover, and his warm-ups.
If his astigmatism had been right, I could have trad-
ed his prescription sunglasses for a beach towel with a
monolith stamped on it.
He asked, “Why didn’t you trade your own

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 Erma Bombeck

clothes?” That was the weird part. They’re cut off from
the rest of the world . . . but they still have taste.
If I thought Easter Island was a shopper’s chal-
lenge, I was about to face the second biggest test of my
buying career. Our next stop was the Galapagos, off the
coast of Ecuador.
The plane landed on a bare strip with nothing but a
lean-to nearby to protect arriving passengers from the
sun. From there, we were herded onto a small boat to
cruise the archipelago that had played a major role in
our understanding of the process of evolution.
When I heard that most of the islands were void of
people, my heart sank. Any day now my husband would
get a sympathy card from American Express on the
death of his wife. I had not charged anything in two
weeks.
I wouldn’t have minded sloshing ashore with the
sea lion swimming around me if there had been a
Stuckey’s on the beach. Even sliding down a mountain
of volcanic ash would have been bearable if Iknew at
the bottom there would be a little boutique with note
cards and scented soaps. But there was nothing.
I was being held captive on a no-frills ship of geolo-
gists, zoologists, and botanists who cared about the
preservation of the world but nothing about toilet tissue.
I hate to make generalizations, but there is a definite
correlation between smart people and little regard for
creature comforts.
The little ship bobbed along for days from island to

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 South America

island studying the blue-footed booby and marine igua-

nas. We had our pictures taken astride a giant tortoise.
We crawled over sharp, jagged rocks, splashed through
water, and hid out in tall grass to watch frigate birds dis-
play themselves. (I felt dirty doing that.)
On one island, scientists were overseeing the repro-
duction of turtles. There were literally thousands of
baby turtles crawling around in a large pit. As I turned
to my husband, my eyes brightened and I opened my
mouth to speak.
“Forget it!” he said. “They are not going to paint
Galapagos on their backs and sell them.”
At nights, I joined the group in the ship’s small
lounge to listen to lectures, watch slides, and make
notes on what we were to see the next day. No one sus-
pected that in college in response to the question,
“What is a chinook?” I wrote in, “The name of the guy I
just broke up with.”
This was not a crowd that was interested in sou-
venirs. They were purists who came on this vacation to
learn something about our planet. If they had known
where I was coming from, they would have studied me.
After five days in the Galapagos, I took my credit
cards out of my bra and returned them to my billfold. I
had suffered my first defeat.
There are few places in the world where you really
have to fight to leave your money. You show me a reli-
gious shrine and Ill show you a T-shirt that reads I GOT
A PEEK AT THE POPE or LIVING IT UP AT LOURDES.

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 Erma Bombeck

One place I was prepared to go home empty-hand-

ed was the North Cape. It is a barren district on the
Arctic Sea made accessible only by a road that winds
through an area that can best be described as desolate.
There are a few small lakes, sparse vegetation, and herds
of reindeer brought to forage during the summer.
We traveled by bus for about an hour out of
Honningsvag, Norway, before we reached the tents of a
village of Laplanders. They were as curious about us as
we were about them. As the souvenir queen, I quickly
admitted defeat.
Our driver started the motor of the bus as a warn-
ing to a passenger who had not yet boarded. It was my
husband. Finally, he emerged from the tent of a
Laplander holding a long roll under his arm. The
moment he entered the bus, we knew what it was...a
reindeer skin. Despite the bitter cold, people gasped as
they threw open their windows and covered their faces
from the smell. In the name of compassion, we sat in the
back of the bus.
Back on the ship the reindeer skin continued to
smell. I sprayed it with deodorant and perfume. We
rolled it in paper and stored it under the bed. We stuffed
it in the closet and zipped it in the luggage. It didn’t
work. The odor permeated our hair and our wardrobe.
Whenever we entered the dining room, someone would
sniff and say, “Don’t be surprised if a herd of male rein-
deer swim out to the ship and ask you to dance.”

a2
 South America

When we arrived home, my husband said, “Where

are we going to put this?”
“You mean after it dies?”
“C’mon,” he said, “I hardly notice it anymore.”
He put it in the garage over his workbench.
We haven’t parked the car in the garage since.

23
 Flying for Peanuts

In my mind, I always imagined the little Wright

Brothers sitting on a curb in Dayton, Ohio, talking
about their future.
Wilbur says, “You know, Orville, it’s getting crowd-
ed down here. We ought to invent something that gets
people off the ground and into the air so they can fly
from one place to another with wings.”
“How do we do that, Wilbur?”
“First, we have to get something we can stuff peo-
ple into .. . like a CAT scanner.”
“CAT scanners haven’t been invented yet, Wilbur.
Besides, it sounds claustrophobic.”

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 Flying for Peanuts

“OK then, something like a silo. We’d put in a cou-

ple of windows.”
“What would you do about breathing?” asks
Orville.
“We'd pressurize the cabin,” says his brother. “Of
course, if something malfunctioned, we’d have little
bags of oxygen that would drop automatically in front of
their faces. People love gimmicks.”
“I don’t know,” muses Orville. “What if passengers
got sick?”
“No problem-o,” 3 says Wilbur. “For a couple of
bucks, we could put little paper barf bags in the seat
pocket with instructions on how to throw up in two lan-
guages. This would be a first-class operation.”
“Could you land these silos in the cities?” asks
Orville.
“Are you crazy? We’d set the passengers down in a
cornfield miles from town and let them get in any way
they could. In fact, I visualize putting the Cincinnati air-
port in Kentucky.”
“What about food?”
“We'd give ’em food they can’t identify. That way
they won’t know if it’s good or bad.”
“You’re a genius, Wilbur.”
“T see it as a country club of the clouds,” offers his
brother. “A place where you can unwind and not have a
care in the world. People will get their flight insurance
in the lobby, go through security and have all their
belongings X-rayed for guns and knives before they

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 Erma Bombeck

board the plane. After the attendants have given them

the evacuation procedures in the event of loss of air
pressure and demonstrated how to use the life jackets in
the event they ditch over water, they’re free to relax.”
“Sounds great, Wilbur. How much do you suppose
we would have to pay each person to fly it?”
“Orville, Orville, you just don’t get it, do you? We
don’t pay them to fly. They pay us.”
At this point, I picture Orville backing slowly away
from his brother until he is out of range, and then he
runs breathlessly to his father and shouts, “Daddy!
Come quick! Wilbur’s bicycle just slipped its chain.”
Most of us have had a love/hate relationship with
airlines. We love them when they’re on time; we hate
them the rest of the time. But the fact that we climb on
and off of them by the millions in a cavalier fashion
proves that we have not lost our adventurous spirit. We
are somehow willing to forgive them for just about any-
thing.
A passenger was sucked through a plane window
on a flight from Portland to Seattle. “It was an incredi-
bly strong force,” he was quoted as saying. “I tried twice
to get back.”
Passengers finally succeeded in getting him back
through the twelve-by-eighteen-inch window. After he
was treated in Seattle for his injuries, he climbed back
on the same plane for the return trip to Portland.
I have been on a plane where the doors were
secured, announcements had been made, and we all set-

96
 Flying for Peanuts

tled back to leave the gate when there was a knock on

the door and the pilot and co-pilot were standing out-
side trying to board.
In another incident, the plane could not take off
because we were hopelessly stuck to the jetport and an
hour later, it looked like we would have to be surgically
removed from one another.
There have been moments when flying is some-
times like pledge week on PBS. I wasn’t aboard this par-
ticular flight, but on a London run to the Madeira
Islands, the pilot’s voice came over the intercom,
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a flight problem.
Would you please contribute as much cash as possible
sO we can buy fuel to continue our journey?”
The passengers passed the hat and came up with
$2,000, enough to buy 14,300 pounds of fuel to reach
London. It seems the Porto Santo airport in Madeira
refused to recognize the pilot’s airline credit card and
demanded cash.
There are no two people on an airplane who have
paid the same price for a seat. Think about it and it will
make you crazy. Some are relatives of airline employees
who pay nothing, some are traveling on amassed
mileage coupons, and some are on super savers where
they travel on Tuesday morning only during the months
when oysters are in season if they buy their tickets at
high tide on the day they were born.
But one class distinction has remained: first class.
These are all people who are either on expense accounts

oF
 Erma Bombeck

or are taking a pet to the “David Letterman Show.”

They are divided from the peasants by a limp blue curtain.
I always wondered how long it would be before the
little people in tourist, economy, and super saver seats
stormed the Limp Curtain to protest inequality.
How long would they sit there and watch that little
curtain being snapped together leaving them suspicious
and classless? It’s the stuff of which revolutions are made.
Well, it happened. A California woman in the coach
section was awarded $8,000 a while back in a suit that
alleged that a first-class passenger cursed and shoved
her as she stood in line to use the bathroom in first-
class. (On a scale of guts, that’s equivalent to landing a
plane in Red Square in the Soviet Union.)
The victim admitted she pushed through the Limp
Curtain as a last resort. She could not reach “her own”
facilities because a drink cart blocked the aisle. The
defendant charged that the woman “trespassed in first
class and violated his priority right to use the bath-
room.”
Good heavens, do you know what this means? Next
thing you know, a super saver passenger will try to infil-
trate his garment bag into a first class compartment or
try to inhale first class smoke on an international flight.
It won’t stop there.
First-class travel has always been a mystique
shrouded in fantasy to most Americans. They visualize
it as a place on the plane where skirts and flight times
are shorter, entertainment is live, and bathrooms are big

98
 Flying for Peanuts

enough to shut the door without standing on the seat.

Some people imagine women with tiaras, large
bosoms, and lace fans throwing back their heads and
laughing, “Let ’em eat stale sheet cake and green noo-
dles back there.”
The irony is that the Limp Curtain dividing first
class from tourist was never meant to keep the tourists
in the dark—but the first-class passengers. No one
wants them to know that their cocktail service is longer
so attendants can get tourist class served first. They
want to keep secret the fact that although they are pay-
ing twice the fare, the food is the same and they have
half as many bathrooms.
Recently, I was riding in business class when I saw
a first-class passenger spying at us through the Limp
Curtain. He knows too much for them to let him live.
The airlines try. They have rules to cover every-
thing. Ironically, the things that airlines concern them-
selves with are the things that never really happen.
How many headlines do you see: GLASS NOT COL-
LECTED BY ATTENDANT BEFORE TAKEOFF RESPONSIBLE
FOR FIRST-CLASS DROWNING? Or, LUGGAGE NOT PUSHED
ALL THE WAY UNDER SEAT CAUSES PLANE TO PLUMMET?
Here they are worried sick about keeping the door
of the cockpit locked to protect them from hijackers and
a captain of a British Airways flight is sucked out of his
seat through the windshield.
I’m not minimizing security. It is a major concern
of airlines and we should all take it as seriously as they

99
 Erma Bombeck

do. However, when I see a terrorist in custody splattered

over the front pages of my newspaper, it is always a mys-
tery to me how he got by in the first place. He is usually
an evil-looking man (or woman) with crazy eyes. He has
no luggage and clutches with both hands a gym bag that
holds an Uzi automatic. Yet, he breezed right through
all that technical equipment. What did they think the
Uzi was? A giant curling iron?
Then I am reminded of a small airport in Iowa
where I watched a little old man in his eighties with no
teeth, a voice like Gomer Pyle’s, suspenders and belt on
his trousers, plaid shirt, and a billed cap with Ralston
Purina stamped on it. He didn’t seem to fit your basic
terrorist profile. But when he stepped through the secu-
rity passage, a buzzer went off. He emptied his change
on a tray and went through again. It buzzed. They
claimed his car keys and his suspenders, which had
metal on them. Five times he went through, stripping as
he went. It was finally ascertained he was trying to
smuggle aboard a half stick of gum covered with foil.
We've all been relieved of “weapons.” I’ve had
needlepoint scissors that couldn’t cut hot butter taken
from me for “safekeeping.” One man said they took his
cigarette lighter because there was a potentially explo-
sive mix of chemicals. “My wife’s cosmetics case proba-
bly had more potential for exploding,” he said. But the
most ludicrous example I can think of was my teenage
son who was bringing back a Masai spear as a souvenir
from Africa.

100
 Flying for Peanuts

Two security officers boarded the plane, escorted

him off, and: stood by while he checked the spear
through with his luggage. I had to wonder when was the
last time Great Britain was attacked by spear.
The idea of not blocking the aisle with things that
do not fit under your seat is a joke. Can you imagine
what a smooth exit you’d make when the person in front
of you reclines his seat, embedding your snack table tray
in your stomach?
I would be remiss if Ididn’t point out the greatest
hazard of flying: the food.
There are some mysteries of airline food that need
to be addressed:

More than six drinks of Snappy Tom will simulate

a heart attack.
Hermetically sealed peanuts are really time cap-
sules and never meant to be opened in this cen-
tury.
Never eat anything that blinks first.
Airline steaks are done when they say they are
done.
No matter what you order, the entrée you didn’t
order will look better.
Some of the best fiction writers got their start writ-
ing airline menus.
The longer the cocktail hour, the more pathetic the
entrées.
When you see pilots eating ice cream before they

101
 Erma Bombeck

board, that is a clue they are ruining their dinner

before it ruins them.

I certainly don’t wish to imply that airlines are not

sensitive to your problems. When passengers com-
plained a few years ago that airline schedules were a dis-
grace and late arrivals were the norm and not the excep-
tion, they quickly did something about it.
They added thirty minutes to all their arrival times.
I could have done that.
A flight that normally takes fifty minutes now
shows eighty minutes on the schedule, so that when it
arrives “on time” you’re not sure if it is the “real” time it
takes to fly that distance or the padded time that is
logged for the FAA.
In defense of airlines, there are a lot of reasons for
being late:

A passenger refused to sit down and they were

thirty seconds late leaving the jetport.
They left late because they were waiting for late-
arriving baggage to be boarded. (Stand back.
Noses grow on this one.)
“someone left a cargo door open” gives you a
warm glow, as does, “We seem to be missing a
crew.”
The rules of aviation are still being written.
Recently, a couple were escorted from a plane because
they smelled bad. (Then again, it could have been the

102
 Flying for Peanuts

entrée.) In another incident, police and a pair of hand-

cuffs awaited a passenger who saw fit to “steal the
music” aboard a plane by using his own headphones. I
don’t even want to imagine what would happen if they
found someone reading lips watching a movie he didn’t
pay for.
An observation is sometimes made that Wilbur and
Orville Wright would be amazed at the crowded skies
that resulted from their invention eighty-eight years ago.
Maybe not.
Somehow I can see Wilbur sitting up there some-
where in the clouds smiling when passengers are reas-
sured before takeoff that their cushions will flotate if
they have to. He is gleeful when we all sit there like flies
on a doughnut while flight attendants ask us to cover
our faces while they come through with an aerosol spray
for bugs before we land in the Bahamas.
When we line up obediently for surveillance while a
dog sniffs our pillboxes containing estrogen, I have a
feeling Orville is there too... shaking his head and say-
ing, “I can’t believe they bought it.”

103
 language

In September 1987, I was asked to introduce His

Holiness Pope John Paul II, who was to preside over a
papal Mass in Sun Devil Stadium, Tempe, Arizona.
I was humbled by the honor and wanted desperate-
ly to do something special. I decided to welcome him in
Polish, his native tongue.
The only Pole I knew was a seamstress who did
alterations for me from time to time, so I said to her,
“Tell me how to welcome the Pope in his own lan-
guage.”
On the night before his arrival, I rehearsed the
speech before a couple of priests in charge of the event. I

104
 Language

took a deep breath before my big finish, “Arizona vita

Oltsa sven-tego yana pavwa druuuuugeggo.”
One of the priests said to me, “Why would you
want to tell the Pope his luggage is lost?”
I am not good with language.

105
 Spain

Sometimes I dazzled myself with my efficiency. I

had the signed contracts for the rented Spanish villa in
my handbag. I had triumphed over the logistics of
getting eight members of our family to rendezvous at
the Barcelona airport. The reserved rental cars were
waiting to take us to the small town of Palafrugell,
where we would be met by a staff that included a
gardener, a housekeeper, and a cook. Every detail was
in place for the perfect holiday on the “wild coast” of
Spain.
We had never planned a vacation quite like it
before.

106
 Spain

At the villa as I alighted from the car, the staff

came forward like a scene straight out of an English
novel. The older woman smiled broadly before she
extended her hand in welcome. “Buenos dias, senora.”
“Hi,” I said warmly in return, pumping her hand.
“Espero que tinguis un bon viadge?”
“Right. So, where do you want our luggage?”
“Si teniu alguna pregunda som aqui per a servir-vos.”
“You do speak English, don’t you?”
“Voldrieu una copa de vii una mica de formadge?”
My husband whispered, “They don’t speak
English.”
“Of course they speak English,” I said. At this
point I used my usual speaking voice when conversing
with foreigners. I place myself squarely in front of their
faces, raise my voice and shout slowly, “DO—YOU—
SPEAK—ENGLISH?”
“They’re not hard of hearing,’
>
said my husband.
“They’re only Spanish.”
By this time, the staff were beginning to talk
among themselves. I once again intervened. “Habdlas
Ingles, por favor?”
All three shook their heads vehemently. “No no,
senora. Habla Catalan.”
“What’s Catalan?” I asked my husband.
“It’s a language spoken in Northern Spain. It’s
Spanish with a twist.”
“They don’t speak English,” I announced to the
group.

107
 Erma Bombeck

“What about those nine credit hours of Spanish

you took in college?”
“The only thing I remember is the Lord’s Prayer.”
“It’s worth a shot,” said my dad.
I couldn’t believe that I had overlooked something
this important. In most large cities, English is spoken ...
somewhere. But here in this small community, it was
nonexistent.
My husband drew me aside. “Let me get this
straight. We are spending the next three weeks in a
house where the only way we can communicate with
the staff is by prayer?”
“T remember a few words here and there,” I lied.
“Besides, there are bound to be a few phrases in the
back of the guidebook.”
I must say at this point that it boggles the mind to
read what expressions writers of these books consider
important for travelers. The phrases included: “May I
have a kilo of oranges?” How many people walk about
with that kind of vitamin deficiency? And here’s one: “I
have lost the key to my diary.” What century was that
written in? One glossary I read had the question: “Will
you direct me to the frivolity?” That could get you in
protective custody in a hurry.
Actually, what this world needs is a universal
phrase for “Is the water safe to drink?”
When the exchange of language does not exist,
serious charades take over. I have always said if God

108
 Spain

had meant for us to speak a universal language, He

would never have given us ten fingers. When the cook,
Ascension, wanted to know what time we wanted the
next meal, she would act like she was feeding herself. I
would hold up eight fingers, signifying eight o’clock.
When my mother enjoyed the dinner, she would pat her
stomach, stick out her tongue a couple of inches, smack
her lips, and say, “Yummy, yummy.” My mother
usually doesn’t talk like that.
Ironically, my college Spanish began to come back
with an occasional word here and there—usually nouns.
Everything was good (bueno) because I couldn’t think of
the word for bad. We did a lot of smiling, bowing, and
nodding, and when things really got frustrating, I would
burst out, “My younger son is arriving with the verbs.
Hang on. He gets here day after tomorrow and things
will be better.” They had no idea what I was babbling
about.
On the morning of the first day at the villa, the
housekeeper, Marguerita, came to me and escorted me
to the kitchen. She put a very large shopping basket
over my arm and pointed to the door. You can’t get
more graphic than that. I was to buy the food at the
town market and Ascension would cook it.
I gathered the women of our family together and
gave each of them a basket and an assignment. One
was to go to the “meat place,” one to the bakery, one
to the fish house, and one to the stalls of fruit and

109
 Erma Bombeck

vegetables that lined the walking street. The

instructions were simple: Don’t even think of
returning to the car with an empty basket! |
We did well at pointing out what we wanted. It was
only when they wanted to know in Catalan how many
or how much that threw us. The merchants were
wonderful. They knew we didn’t know diddly from
squat. After a couple of stressful hours at the market, I
plopped down in a chair at the small outdoor cafe at the
end of the street and summoned a waiter. “Uno
cabeza,” I said crisply. The waiter stared at me. I
repeated my order.
Turning to my husband I said, “Is it too early to
order a beer or what?”
“You want a cerveza,” he said. “You have just
ordered a head.”
“T knew that,” I said. “I just wanted a cabeza on
my cerveza.”
The son with the verbs helped.
Four years at USC and finally something was
paying off. He could use the phone to confirm our
reservations, tell the staff what we wanted to eat, order
fresh towels, and get information on tourist sites.
There was no television or radio in the house,
which didn’t matter as we wouldn’t have been able to
understand them anyway. So we were left to our
imagination to fill up the evening hours. It had been a
long time since we had done that. Someone had the
foresight to bring along a game, Trivial Pursuit, and

110
 Spain

every night we would gather like the Brady Bunch in

the library. It has always been my theory that the family
that plays together gets on one another’s nerves. I have
no reason to change my opinion.
I am too impatient to play games. Especially
thinking ones. If I don’t know the answer to something
I say, “I don’t know and I don’t care” and I pass the die
on to the next team. I play games to get them over with.
Other people play games to have a good time.
My son was the worst. Every time he got a
question, we lost another ten minutes of the game. He
contended there was no answer you couldn’t come up
with if you used logic. Logic took time. Lots of it.
“All right,” said my aunt, drawing a card, “for
Science and Nature, how many compartments does a
cow’s stomach have?”
“He doesn’t know that,” I said. “Pass the die.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, “give me a chance.”
“You know nothing about cows,” I insisted.
“You don’t know that,” he said defensively.
“IT know you entered a cow-naming contest when
you were seven years old and named the cow Big Bill.
You do not know anything about cows.”
He went into his hypnotic state and said, “Let’s
see, a car has one compartment for gloves, a submarine
has at least one compartment, a sleeper on a train is a
compartment. I say a cow has four.”
“Right,” chirped my aunt. “Roll again.”
It wasn’t just me. As the evenings wore on, we all

111
 Erma Bombeck

got a little testy from too much togetherness.

One night my mother drew a question. “What
bodily function can reach the breakneck speed of two
hundred miles an hour?” She answered quickly, “My
husband’s feet hitting for the bathroom when I pull in
the driveway with groceries to unload.” My father was
not amused. He said if she was so smart, then how
come she didn’t know how many stars were in Orion’s
belt. If it had been Joan Collins’s belt, she’d have
known.
I was angry at my husband because he couldn’t
remember the answer to “In her book, what does Erma
Bombeck say the grass is always greener over?” and all
in all, we agreed we had to get out of the villa more.
The upside to being in a home atmosphere is that
everyone can pretty much do his own thing. It’s
probably one of the most relaxing vacations you can
plan. By this time, Ascension and Marguerita were able
to tune out all of us, and I kept smiling and Mother
kept patting her stomach (which was growing before
our eyes) and saying, “Yummy, yummy.”
Our sons and their friend left every morning to
cruise up and down the Costa Brava shoreline in search
of topless beaches. My parents and aunt played cards,
and my husband and I climbed over the rocks of our
private beach watching the blue waters of the
Mediterranean. He did a little fishing from the shore and
I needlepointed. One day as we swung down to our
familiar spot, we heard voices. They belonged to two

112
 Spain

totally nude bathers making their way toward the water.

For a full five minutes, my husband and I turned to salt.
The naked woman nearest us resumed her way to
the water. At one point my husband cleared his throat
and I thought he was going to say something, but he
didn’t.
Finally, she entered the water and swam out to a
rock about fifty feet away and stretched out lazily to
catch some sun. My husband turned to me and said,
“Did you see that! She wasn’t wearing shoes. She could
have cut her feet to ribbons on these rocks.”
“You really are certifiable, aren’t you?” I asked
after a minute. “Here’s a tramp who invades our space
and the only thing you see are her tender feet!”
“How do you know she’s a tramp?” he asked. “She
looks like she has a nice personality.”
“She has the personality of a food processor.”
“You don’t know that either,” he charged.
“When you leave an ankle bracelet on in salt water
you’re not too bright.”
“Well, she obviously comes from a good family.
Probably military.”
“How can you possibly arrive at a revelation like
that?”
“Her posture. It’s superb.”
“Men! I suppose you’d want your son to marry
someone with a tattoo of a duck on her hip.”
“That wasn’t a duck. It was probably a family crest
of some kind.”

113
 Erma Bombeck

“Right. And Prince Charles has two lions tattooed

on his bicep. Why are you so stubborn about this loose
woman who cavorts around in the buff?” |
“And why are you so vindictive and judgmental
about a person you have never seen . . . fully clothed.
Frankly, I’d like to see her become a member of our
family.”
“She steps a foot in this family and I’m outta
here,” I said, jamming my needlepoint in the bag.
“Ts this an ultimatum?”
“You bet your sweet bird it is.”
At this point, the other figure, a male nude bather
wearing only a wedding ring, jumped into the water and
joined our nymph friend on the rock.
My husband said, “Now he’s slime.”
“Tt’s funny,” I said, “he struck me as someone who
would be very kind to his mother.”
The iciness between us was still there at dinner.
When Marguerita served us the soup I tapped her on
the arm and pantomimed taking off all my clothes and
pointed to the beach and waved my arms like I was
swimming.
“She doesn’t understand you,” said my aunt.
“Does the word slut have any meaning in your
language?” I shouted.
She looked puzzled, then smiled and went to the
kitchen. When she returned, she had a picture of the
man and woman we had seen on the beach without

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 Spain

clothes. She pointed to the woman, then cradled her

arms like she was rocking a baby.
“She is telling you those people in the nude are her
daughter and son-in-law,” said my husband.
I turned to my son, smiled, and said, “Give me a
nice noun and a verb... quick!”
On the next to the last day at the villa as we
summed up our three weeks, it was a miracle we had
survived. We had pantomimed our way through
Perpignan, France, where we took a day trip. No one in
our party spoke a single word of French. We had made
it to the bullfights in Barcelona, and every other day we
actually looked forward to going to the marketplace
where it was more social than necessary.
When we were told the owner of the villa, an
Englishman, was due that night, I must admit we were all
pretty excited at the prospect of speaking English again.
He invited us for drinks to the guest house where
he was holding forth. His first words were, “Well,
ahsposeyuvad a raaathaventrous time at the villa?”
We all leaned forward, straining for something we
thought we had missed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I say .. . iopeather . . . you mericansadnuf of ah
jolly whatimeto retn.”
My God, he talked like “Masterpiece Theatre” on
fast forward. None of us had a clue as to what he was
saying.

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 Erma Bombeck

I positioned myself in front of his face and said

slowly in a loud voice, “HOW LONG HAVE YOU
OWNED THE VILLA?” As he answered, we all
nodded and smiled from time to time. Mother grabbed
an hors d’oeuvre, rubbed her stomach, smacked her
lips, and said, “Yummy, yummy.”

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 Six Worst Arguments
on Vacation

A good argument, when conducted properly, takes

the time and full attention of two people.
When performed at home, an argument suffers
from too many interruptions and outside pressures.
The phone rings. Someone is late for work. Children
must be fed. Sometimes one party will break in with,
“Are you finished? ‘Knots Landing’ starts in five
minutes.” You get busy.
On a vacation, however, there are no limitations on
how far you can take a disagreement. For most couples

17
 Erma Bombeck

it is the most time they have spent together since their

honeymoon. Courtesy has given way to time. Some of
our better arguments have erupted on foreign soil.

TOPIC: “Why can’t you admit you’re lost?”

PLACE: Copenhagen, Denmark
LENGTH OF ARGUMENT: Thirty-six hours
HIGHLIGHTS:
“What’s with you men? Would hair stop growing
on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?”
“I did write down the word you gave me at each
corner. How was I to know it was the Danish word for
TStreeiet
“What do you mean, ‘Does anything look
familiar’? I just got here, remember. I’m not taking
another step until you are sure you know where you’re
going.”
“I don’t want to panic you, but our plane leaves in
four days. We are going the wrong way. You didn’t
believe me when I told you the smoke alarm in our
kitchen needed batteries either.”
“It’s hereditary. Your mother couldn’t find her way
out of a phone booth if you turned her around. I love
your mother. I love your whole family. All of you just
need to be supervised at all times!”

ToPIc: “Only an idiot jogs here!”

PLACE: African bush in Kenya
LENGTH OF ARGUMENT: Three days

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 Six Worst Arguments on Vacation

HIGHLIGHTS:

“Was it your intention to bring me to Africa

married and send me home a widow? Because if it was
I’m going to cash in the insurance policies now, have
my entire body lifted, and go straight to the French
Riviera.”
“If you are not back in two days, we’re leaving you
here. This is my final word. No one is going to feel
sorry for you because you’re stupid. We’re going to ship
your body home and prop it up in the Boston
Marathon. It will be hours before people realize you’re
not moving under your own steam.”
“There’s danger out there. Don’t you realize that?
You can’t outrun a cheetah doing a twenty-minute mile.”
“Honey, I’m only saying these rotten things
because I love you and I care about you. I cannot imagine
what I would do without you.”
“OK, be stubborn. If you break your leg, don’t
come running to me
|»?

ToPIc: “I am ready to walk out the door and you

have to go to the bathroom. Why am I not surprised?”
PLACE: Europe, Asia, Mideast, South America,
South Pacific, Orient, Caribbean, Mediterranean,
Mexico, Australia, and every place we’ve ever visited
LENGTH OF ARGUMENT: Time it takes to go to the
bathroom
HIGHLIGHTS:
“I swear you have kidneys the size of lentils.”

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 Erma Bombeck

“I could go too if I thought about it long enough,

but I don’t want to inconvenience all the people who
have to wait for me.” |
“Why do you think you will never see another
bathroom during the next six hours? They’re
everywhere, you know.”
“It’s nothing but a habit. You see me going out the
door and your mind instantly goes to your biological
functions. You are so programmed, you see an open
door and run for the bathroom.”
“I know what you’re doing in there. You’re killing
time. You have to put the lid down, refold the towels,
dry off the soap, replace the washers, alphabetize your
toiletries, and look at your teeth.”

Topic: “What do you mean I don’t need a rug?”

PLACE: Athens, Greece
LENGTH OF ARGUMENT: Ongoing today
HIGHLIGHTS:
“T’ve got arthritis and I don’t need that, either. It’s
not like I’m buying a country.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to carry it. Just
give me my airline ticket and I’ll sit on the wing so you
won’t be embarrassed.”
“Hey, you’re the one who bought a Vuitton
suitcase in Hong Kong for $36 and Vuitton was
misspelled. Don’t tell me about shopping carefully.”
“I am spending my own money on it and am
putting it in the hallway. If you want to walk on it, there

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 Six Worst Arguments on Vacation

will be a toll basket at each end. You can either toss in

coins each time or you can buy tokens.”
“How do I know it will fit? How do I know
Wednesday follows Tuesday? I just know it, that’s all. If
I don’t know, who’s to know?”
“I heard that! And I could not get the same thing
for less at Wal-Mart.”

ToPIc: “I am not going scuba diving.”

PLACE: St. Thomas
LENGTH OF ARGUMENT: Twelve hours
HIGHLIGHTS:
“I wish I were one of those perfect people who do
not have a single fear, but I’m not and that’s my final
word on the subject.”
“If God meant for me to crawl around on the
ocean floor, He would have given me anchors for feet.”
“Why is it when I don’t want to do what you want
to do I’m always wrong? You love making me feel
inferior, don’t you?”
“Every time I’ve seen a diver on Jacques Cousteau
specials, he has fear in his eyes. Enough said. Case
closed.”
“When I started this trip I said to myself, “How can
I ruin his vacation?’ and I answered myself, ‘Refuse to
go scuba diving with him. That will make him crazy.’
You wanta know the truth? I’ve been planning this for
weeks! My final word.”

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 Erma Bombeck

Topic: “I never said I’d meet you under the clock.”

PLACE: Shanghai, China
LENGTH OF ARGUMENT: Twenty minutes at high
volume, two hours in silence
HIGHLIGHTS:
“You misunderstood me, dear. I always return to
the bus and you know it.”
“There is no need to shout. Everyone on the bus
can hear every word.”
“Why are you so sensitive? The people applauded
when you boarded because you held the bus up for
thirty minutes. It was a joke. Can’t you take a joke
anymore?”
“How could I have said I’d meet you at the clock
when I don’t know where the clock is?”
“IT am sorry you wasted all your shopping time
looking for me. I will fill out the necessary papers to
have you canonized the minute we get home. Now put
a cork in it.”
“Aha! I wondered when you’d dig up the Greek
rug!”

122
 Death by Drivers

I can’t remember which airline it is, but just before

their plane docks at the gate, a captain comes on the
intercom and announces, “You have just completed the
safest part of your trip.”
As I contemplate the row of yellow taxis waiting
for the deplaning passengers at the curb, I can only nod
my head and mumble, “Isn’t that the truth?”
Probably the dumbest thing Americans do is to
climb inside a car with a perfect stranger and assume he
is going to get you where you want to go.
I had a driver once—a Sean Penn Charm School
graduate—who got in a shouting match with a bunch of

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 Erma Bombeck

crazies on the San Diego Freeway. I expected any

minute to be looking into the barrel of a cannon.
Another time, my cabdriver actually leaned out of
his car window and passed a map to the driver of a
limousine so he could circle the exit ramp to my hotel.
We were going sixty miles an hour at the time.
But the night I landed in New York alone sort of
sums it all up. A guy saw me get my luggage off the
carousel, grabbed it out of my hands, and ordered, “I
have a car. Follow me.”
Erma, the idiot, followed him to the parking lot
where he threw my luggage in the trunk and said, “Get
in. I’m going to get a few more fares.”
“Hold it!” I said. “This is not a regular cab. I want
a regular cab and a driver. Give me back my luggage.”
He shrugged and obliged.
At the taxi stand, a nice young man got out of his
cab, held the door for me, and said, “You going to
Manhattan? Here, give me your bag.” This was more
like it.
I usually like to strike up a conversation with
cabbies. It not only gives you a perspective of what the
world is thinking about, but I always figure if they know
I’m a homeroom mother, they’ll think twice about
driving recklessly.
This one was a wonderful driver.
“So what did you do before you drove a cab?” I
asked.
“I was in the seminary studying to become a

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 Death by Drivers

priest.” His large brown, pious eyes met mine in his

rearview mirror.
I think I looked skyward and mouthed silently,
“Thank you, God.”
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
“They asked me to . . . about the time I heard the
voices.”
“You heard voices?”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said. “They
listen to me and then come after me.”
“Then by all means don’t—”
“One night,” he said, getting very excited, “right
here on this seat, one of ‘them’ materialized. I thought I
couldn’t stand it. My head hurt. I had to stop the car
and get out—”
“You don’t have to tell me this....”
“They wouldn’t let me back in the car again. Do
you know what I’m saying?”
BYes es eyes a0.
He paused but kept looking at me in the rearview
mirror.
Finally, I said brightly, “So, what do you think of
Shirley MacLaine’s book?”
“She’s a phony,” he said sharply.
“That was my feeling,” I said, nodding my head,
not wanting to disagree.
I was in a car with a licensed driver whose elevator
was stuck between floors.
I have ridden with Ph.D.’s who have a résumé in

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 Erma Bombeck

their glove compartment, strung-out druggies, and a

limo driver in California who wanted me to help him
sell a story describing the night he had Jack Nicholson
and Warren Beatty in his car. What a sweetheart.
In Istanbul, we had a cabbie from hell who literally
aimed for people in the crosswalk to see how close he
could come to hitting them. He steered the car the
entire time with the little finger of his right hand
inserted into a small elastic loop attached to his steering
wheel. He also smelled like a yak in heat.
Crazies and car pollutants are not the worst of it.
The most frustrating thing about riding a cab in
America is being unable to find a driver who speaks
English. I usually climb into a cab driven by Boris
Szorgyloklov, who arrived two weeks ago from Odessa,
Russia.
The word “hello” is cookie time for Boris. You
wonder how it developed that this man came to
America and found himself behind the wheel of a
Japanese car.
One can only surmise Boris arrived in this country
and went straight to a placement bureau where a
sociologist gave him a test. At the end, the sociologist
said, “You cannot speak a word of English, you have
never driven a car in your entire life, you come from a
rural community. You are qualified for only one job:
driving a cab in New York.”
In Los Angeles one afternoon, I climbed into a cab
with an Arab driver who could speak only four words,

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 Death by Drivers

“I am not rich.” As he grabbed a $20 bill out of my

hand for an eight-minute ride, I taught him three more
new words, “I’m getting there.”
When cabs are scarce, however, you are often at
their mercy. One night in Mexico, a driver jammed six
of us into a single cab. A friend of mine straddled the
gearshift. At the end of the ride, she crawled out of the
front seat. “You OK?” we asked. “Every time he
changed gears,” she said, “it was a religious ex-
perience.”
After our rental car experience in Italy, my
husband and I talked about engaging a car with a
driver. A lot of our friends had done it. Our neighbors,
Bob and Judy, said it was wonderful to set your own
pace, see only what you want to see, have a flexible
schedule, and leave the driving to someone else. ‘They
said it’s so easy to set up. All you do is make
arrangements with your travel agent and be met at the
airport by a car and a driver.
Nothing was said about being heavily sedated.

127
 Indonesia

Every country in the world worries about the threat

of aggressive neighbors who seek to conquer them. Not
to worry. The Russians will do themselves in by
drinking too much vodka. The Japanese will smoke
themselves to death, the Finns will phase themselves
out from arteries clogged with all those dairy fats, and
the entire population of Indonesia will eventually die
from the traffic. It’s just a matter of time.
For a change, both my husband and I were excited
about going to Indonesia. Usually we were a house
divided on where we were going to go and what we
were going to do, but this country offered everything. It

128
 Indonesia

had white, sandy beaches; the Ujung Kulon Game

Reserve; Krakatau, the volcano that erupted in 1883,
creating the largest explosion ever recorded in the
history of the world; plus one of the most unusual
cultures in the world. Although the largest religion is
Islam, there is a blend of Hinduism, Buddhism,
Christianity, and animism throughout the country.
Once you see the drivers in Indonesia, you
understand why religion plays such an important part
in their lives. After a day as a passenger in a car, I
would have worshipped the hotel draperies if I had
thought they would protect me from bodily harm.
The first thing we noticed in Jakarta (Java) was the
absence of dogs and cats. It didn’t take me long to
figure out they had probably once roamed this part of
the world in great numbers, but one by one they were
picked off by Mercedes and Volvos as they tried to cross
the street. It brought about their extinction. People
were next.
We picked up our guide in Yogyakarta at the hotel.
Outside, he introduced us to our driver. This was very
unusual, as one man often serves as the driver and the guide.
The driver was young, frail, and said little. He was
emotionless, and from time to time he displayed a tic
of sorts. His right eye would blink, his head would jerk,
and he stretched his neck as if he had on a tight tie.
“We visit the Sultan’s Palace,” said the guide,
smiling. The car shot out of the driveway like the
Batmobile in Gotham City.

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 Erma Bombeck

I'd like to point out here that I am not a nervous

passenger. I have survived three teenage drivers: one
who used cruise control in downtown traffic at five P.M.,
one who put on full makeup and finished her
homework while driving through a construction area,
and another who got a ticket for driving forty-five miles
per hour... in reverse. But this was unbelievable.
Most of the highways in Indonesia are two lanes.
Everyone passes. Everyone. How do they do this?
you ask.
There are basically seven modes of transportation
in the country. At the slowest and bottom of the
spectrum is the horse and carriage, which is exactly
what it sounds like. Next is the pedicab. This is a little
buggy on two wheels hooked up to a man who pulls it
through traffic. The becak or powered tricycle is next,
followed by motor scooters, hired cars (and taxis), then
trucks, and finally buses.
This is how the pecking order works. Your car
passes another car at a speed of fifty or sixty miles per
hour. If you meet a motor scooter head-on in the
passing lane at the same time, the motor scooter is
below you on the scale of size. He has to disappear.
Don’t ask me where. He just knows that. On the other
hand, if you are in a car and meet a truck or a bus, then
you must give way.
It’s the old game of chicken that has reached state-
of-the-art.
All the while our lives are hanging in the balance as

130
 Indonesia

our guide is trying to indicate temples and points of

interest. I can’t take my eyes off the driver.
Every once in a while, the driver engages in a little
ritual that is bizarre. As we stop for a light, he tilts his
head all the way to his shoulder and then with both
hands gives his head a jerk that would have broken a
normal spinal column in half.
“Why does he do that?” I asked our guide.
“It relieves the tension,” he says. “Actually, he is a
very good driver. You are here to relax. Just sit back and
enjoy.”
It would have taken a lobotomy for me to relax.
I'd like to say that despite the frenzy and the insane
passing, I never saw an accident. But that’s not true. It
was like being in the middle of Demolition Derby. I saw
women on bicycles balancing trays of fruit on their
heads, only to be forced to hit the ditch and become
fruit salad.
I saw an ambulance give way to—you got it—a
truck, and in the city it was not unusual to see people
sitting on the curb holding bandaged heads while they
hauled their vehicles away. But through it all, I never
once saw anger, obscene gestures, or exasperation. I
never heard shouts or language of any kind. . . only
quiet, emotionless resignation.
Over dinner our first night there, our guide kept
insisting, “You must relax, miss. How would you like to
see Indonesian dancers in Ballet of Ramayana at the
theater?”

131
 Erma Bombeck

He was right. I had worn a hole in the floor of the

back seat of the car where all day I had jammed on
imaginary brakes with my foot. “T’ll go back to the hotel
and change into something suitable,” I said.
I travel with a limited wardrobe, but I always carry
one dress for special occasions. This one was all white
with a gold belt and sandals. We should have been
suspicious we weren’t talking Bolshoi-when our driver
drove like a maniac down dark alleys and came to a
stop on a dirt road several feet from the “theater.”
Actually, it was a tent with the glow of naked light
bulbs shining through the-canvas. We bought our
tickets and stepped inside. Not only was I overdressed,
but the performance was undersold. There must have
been seven hundred folding chairs distributed around
the riser. There were five other people there besides
ourselves. I think they were German tourists.
At’ seven o’clock, the music started and the
graceful dancers glided onto the stage. Our guide
leaned over to interpret what was transpiring on
stage. “A young man named Jaka Tarub, while hunting
birds one day, sees a lovely nymph descending from
Heaven to bathe in the forest lake,” he whispered.
“He hides but watches the nymph Nawangwulan and
falls in love with her. Jaka Tarub steals her clothing. He
returns to his hiding place and creates a disturbance to
frighten Nawangwulan, but she is unable to find her
clothing and so cannot return to Heaven. Feeling sad
and lonely...”

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 Indonesia

I listened numbly. My eyes felt like balloons filled

with water.
At eight-thirty, our guide was still talking nonstop.
“When Dasamuka attacks him and forces him to fight,
Kala Marica then transforms himself into a Golden
Deer to lure Rama and Lesmana away from Sinta so
that Dasamuka can kidnap Sinta. The Golden Deer
hen teases .. co |
From time to time, my head would fall to my chest
and I would jerk it up to hear his voice reciting in a
monotone, “In return, Sinta-gives her hairpin to
Senggana to deliver to Rama... .”
I spit on my fingers and rubbed them across my
eyeballs. My husband had his head between his legs.
His elbows touched the floor. He was comatose. I
looked for some kind of compassion from the five other
people in the audience. They were gone. My arm was
bruiséd from where I had pinched myself in an effort to
regain consciousness by inflicting pain. “Then the ape
tells both ladies to leave and he begins to destroy the
garden,” the guide droned on. “He breaks loose and
sets Alengka on fire, then returns to Pancawait to .
It was after eleven when we fell into the car that
took us to our hotel. I slept the entire time. Maybe that
was the answer to surviving as a passenger in Indonesia.
As a break in our schedule, we planned a cruise
through the Spice Islands. My husband wanted to
climb the mountainof cinder-sand and look down into
the smoking remains of Krakatau. It was nice to get out

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 Erma Bombeck

of the fast lane and not worry about rites of passage.

When we docked five days later, the captain of the
boat said he would be glad to drop several of us off at
our hotel. I settled back into the cushions of his car as if
I were safe in the hands of Allstate.
The next thing you know we were weaving in and
out of traffic like we were competing in time trials at the
Indy 500. Suddenly there was a screech of brakes as we
stopped for a red light. Then there was a crash from
behind and I flew into the seat in front of me. I turned
to look at the van behind us. One of the passengers had
hit the windshield. An ambulance siren sounded in the
distance. The man assured us he was all right.
I bowed my head and said a silent prayer to the
patron saint of Indonesian passengers: Our Lady of
Valium.

134
 Slides

No one wants to see your slides.

Get that through your head.
Not your parents who gave you life. Not your kids
who are insecure and need your approval. Not your
priest, minister, or rabbi who are paid to be kind and
forgiving. Not even someone whose life you saved in
the war who owes you big.
Every amateur photographer who returns from a
vacation fantasizes about putting his pictures in “some
kind of order” and perhaps showing them at the Y
some evening for a minimal price at the door. Some
even entertain thoughts of entering their picture of a

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 Erma Bombeck

dog trying to bite the water coming out of a garden

hose in some Kodak competition. A few will even go so
far as to look up the addresses of National Geographic or
Arizona Highways in the library.
The slides usually end up in shoeboxes in the
closet next to a bowling ball. They become the Siberia
of Vacations Past. There are only a few occasions when
slides can be shown to benefit mankind.

1. Take seven hundred of them to a war and within

minutes, everyone will disperse and go home. Most
countries consider slides inhumane, but they can be
used in confrontations where no peaceful solution 1s
feasible.
2. Slides are effective in isolated areas where
kitchen table surgery is sometimes the only option and
anesthetic is not available. There have been cases where
the patient has only to hear a click and a voice
introducing a couple met in a diner and he is out like a
light.
3. Police are just beginning to realize the benefits
of a tray of slides to pry confessions out of criminals
who proclaim their innocence until force is used. The
problem is they confess to anything. One man claimed
he was responsible for firing the shot that killed Bambi’s
mother.
4. Sleep labs throughout the country are finding
that slides could replace the sleeping pill. For
generations, scientists have been desperate to find an

136
 Slides

effective sleep remedy for insomniacs that is not habit-

forming. Slides fill the bill.
5. Parents are always looking for new ways to get
their grown children married and out of the nest. Quite
inadvertently one night, a couple showed slides of their
trip to Hoover Dam. When they flipped on the lights,
their son had gone. This is considered a breakthrough.
6. It is within the realm of possibility that slides
may one day replace nuclear power as a bargaining chip
to establish peace between nations. If the Soviet Union
has thirty thousand slides of Lenin trained toward the
United States, then the United States would stockpile
fifty thousand slides of Warren G. Harding. Only a fool
would fire off that first slide.

Every time my husband has that sly grin on his face

and turns off all the lights and pleads, “Tonight’s the
night,” I cringe.
“T do have a headache.”
“This will relax you,” he whispers.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“No, no, just sit back and...”
“Don’t make me do this!”
As the slides fall into the slot and the heat of the
celluloid casts a smoky glow over the light on the
projector, my eyes begin to glaze over. Then, as if I
have taken a prescription drug, my jaw sags, my head
eases back onto the pillow, and I sleep . . . the sleep of
slides.

137,
 Africa

Whenever I thought about Africa, I thought of Joy

Adamson, author of Born Free. I visualized her running
through tall grass toward the lioness she had raised
from a cub before returning it to the wilds, shouting,
“Elsa! Elsa!” I always wondered what would happen if
she got within bad-breath distance, squinted, and
recoiled, “You’re not Elsa.”
I thought about Ernest Hemingway living in a
tent at the foot of Kilimanjaro and Jane Goodall
down to the last rubber band for her ponytail sitting
on a mountain observing chimpanzees. I thought of
Robert Ruark and Stewart Granger and Richard

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 Africa

Leakey. But mostly, when I romanticized about that

primitive, mysterious continent, I thought about Ava
Gardner.
On screen, Ava visited the Africa I wanted to
visit—the Africa where you never sweated, your hair
stayed curled, and your lipstick remained moist. Where
lions were pets, ice cubes reproduced themselves, and
you were never afraid to go to the bathroom alone.
Where there were fourteen men to every woman and
mosquitoes didn’t nest in your hairspray.
But alas, Ava’s films mirrored the gentle Africa of a
half century ago. There was no danger then... only a
land filled with malaria and uncharted jungles,
unfriendly native tribes, wild animals, and cutthroats in
search of gold.
The year I went to Africa, I went on a guided tour
with eleven amateur photographers on a camera safari.
You don’t know what fear is until you are out in the
bush with eleven shutter-happy hunters who load film
and shoot at anything that moves.
These are people who travel with an arsenal.
Each photographer on the trip averages six hundred
exposures of stills and about two thousand feet of
movies. They carry camera bags worth more than
the national budgets of all the African nations
combined. They keep meticulous logs of what
animals they see, where they see them, and what
the animals are doing when they are spotted. They
sit around campfires at night, sucking the dust off

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 Erma Bombeck

their lenses with rubber bulbs and speaking a

language of ASAs and time exposures.
My husband is one of them. He brought a camera
to his own wedding. He postponed the birth of our first
child because he was “losing his light.” He is the kind
of man who goes to the Grand Canyon and insists on
stopping the car and getting out to take a picture
instead of rolling the car window down like everyone
else.
As I watch all of these adventurers on the plane,
twirling the dials on their lenses, flashing their
strobes to see if the batteries are working, and
photographing their feet, I know this is not a group
to turn your back on.
Secretly, I vow to ignore all of them and create my
own Ava Gardner world. In Kenya, I didn’t bother to
unpack but headed straight for a Nairobi store where
they outfitted you in safari clothes. If I was going to
feed elephants and romp with small lions, I couldn’t
run around in pantyhose.
A short drive out of Nairobi, a small row of blue
tents came into view. This was more like it. The Africa
I dreamed about. It was all there as I had imagined it:
the campfire, the directors’ chairs, the mosquito netting
over the cots, the shovel behind the tent by a sign that
read HIPPOS BURY THEIRS . . . YOU BURY YOURS. I hadn’t
remembered that part.
Any fantasy I had of hanging around the tent all
day with a cooler and a typewriter vanished in the early

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hours of the first day. These photographers were hell-

bent on bagging their limit of photos and nothing was
going to stop them. At dawn, we all piled into Land
Rovers painted with zebra stripes in pursuit of the
animals of Africa.
The tour group was interesting. There was an
elderly couple named Dan and Martha who were
from a retirement community in Florida. Actually, I
never saw Dan and Martha the entire two weeks we
were there. They were always huddled under a
raincoat that tented both of their bodies. It seems
Martha’s film was not winding properly and Dan had
to open the back of the camera and didn’t want to
expose the film to light.
Mr. Markey was a retired science teacher who
carried a serious German camera. If you took an
aspirin, you couldn’t operate heavy machinery or Mr.
Markey’s camera. He slept with it.
The Rosenstads were a kinky couple who only
photographed animals mating. They could spot them
a half mile away. Both of their heads would shoot up
through the sunroof of the Land Rover like a jack-in-
the-box as they shouted, “Stop the car! They’re
doing it!” Since lions in heat mate every ten minutes,
Mrs. Rosenstad kept her camcorder running for
thirty minutes one afternoon while the rest of us
sweltered in the sun.
The only significant thing I remember about
Carrie and her husband, Max, was that they wore the

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same clothes for two weeks. Their five pieces of luggage

contained nothing but film and batteries. She found a
puff adder snake near her tent one night and shrugged
it off. I figured there was only one thing that could
strike fear into the hearts of Carrie and Max... the
horror that they would die and never again see another
KODAK FILM SOLD HERE sign.
Tim was a student and a loner. J thought he was a
normal person like me when I saw him one day with a
Polaroid camera around his neck. I shared with him
that I had an Instamatic at home that did everything
but heat soup and validate my parking ticket. He
looked at me like something that had died. “I use this
only to see if I’m getting the right reading on my light.”
I told him I knew that.
Vern and June Gibbs drove everyone crazy. They
didn’t take so many pictures as they gave advice. You
would have thought he had been sired by Ansel Adams.
Every time someone snapped a shot, he shook his head
and asked, “What’s your ASA? I thought so. I’d be
willing to bet my life you’re overexposed.” At lodges
when someone would complain about his camera, he’d
get the “Where’s your manual?” lecture. Like you’re
going to lug that around in your shoe bag, right?
This motley assortment seemed to have only two
things in common. All had cameras that were extinct
before they got them to their cars, and although they
were all photographers, not one of them knew how to
use any camera other than his own.

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Since Max seemed to be such an authority, I asked

him one day to snap a picture of my husband and me
together. This stunned the entire group as they never
had people in their pictures.
Max looked at my husband’s camera like it was
ticking.
“Where is the viewfinder?” he asked.
“Where do I push?”
“How do you focus it?”
“Where’s the light meter?”
My husband spent more time talking to him than
he had talking with me on the entire trip.
We grinned and Max snapped the picture. When
we got the print back, our heads were cut off.
I had the distinction of being the only camera-
dead person on the tour. As we bumped along the
corduroy roads of Africa’s game reserves, I watched
them load, shoot, reload, and shoot again. They
prided themselves on not only capturing Africa’s
animals on film, but saving them from being hunted
to extinction by men toting guns. This was true. But I
couldn’t help wondering how many animals would
have heart attacks trying to outrun the Land Rovers
and escape to a place where they were safe from
prying lenses. How many of them would go deaf from
someone beating on a pie pan to lure them out of
hiding places or pounding his fists on the side of the
Land Rover to get their ears to stand up. How many
could hang on to their vision with all those lights

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flashing in their faces by day and the headlights

freezing them in their tracks by night. How long would
it be before photographers wouldn’t be satisfied to
photograph them as they were, but insist they “do
something” like tell where they’re from, moisten their
lips, or show a little leg.
Africa couldn’t have been this crowded when Ava was
there. I would have remembered. There were lines at the
buffet tables at the lodges, busloads of tourists at roadside
gift shops, and one day when a female lion was spotted
with her cubs, the word went out and within minutes the
traffic looked like a police raid on a nude bar.
I was the woman of mystery on the trip. I dressed
for dinner. At night I stared for hours at the campfire
and was also the only person who did not have a
camera around my neck.
One night as I relaxed alone by the dying fire, Tim
passed by on his way to Max’s tent. He was trying to
trade his malaria pills for a roll of Kodachrome ASA
64. He paused before he spoke. “I’m curious. What do
you get out of this trip? I don’t see how you can come
on a camera safari to Africa and sit there like a portrait
with all those animals around just waiting to be shot.
Wouldn’t you like to go home with a picture of a white
rhino for your fireplace or den?”
I smiled. “Africa isn’t a place where you have to
have a reason to come. I don’t want my vision limited
by a camera lens. I’m content to eat Africa’s dust, sweat
in its heat, bask in its silence. I don’t have to zoom in

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on a hippo yawning. It’s enough for me to pull up to a

water hole at dusk, turn off the motor of the Land
Rover, and just sit and watch for hours the parade of
animals that come to drink or roll around in the mud to
coat and soothe their wounds. Or maybe relax on the
deck of a boat on the Zambezi River on a cool African
evening and watch crocodiles surface. Africa is a place
for adventurers . . . for lovers and romantics. Do you
understand what I’m saying?”
There was a long pause before he said, “Get a life”
and disappeared in the darkness.
Actually, my being on the trip did serve some
purpose. I was a photographer’s decoy. This is how it
worked. If one of the camera people wanted to take a
picture of a park ranger with earlobes to his shoulders,
with bones in them, he would get me to stroll within
camera range and strike a pose. Then at the last
minute, he would swing the camera out of my range
and get the picture he really wanted.
One night during our final week in Africa, I was
sitting on the veranda in one of the game lodges
sipping on something cold. I had tied a yellow scarf
around my pith helmet, and, miracle of miracles, my
nail polish didn’t clash with the khaki safari jacket. I
ran my fingers around the rim of the glass, lost in
fantasy of the movie Mogambo with Clark Gable,
Grace Kelly, and Ava.
I was remembering when Grace Kelly decided to
take a walk away from the camp compound and Clark

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Gable, fearing for her safety, ran after her and was so
relieved she was safe he forgot she belonged to.
someone else and they kissed under the brilliant
African sky, silhouetted with acacia trees.
I drifted back to reality. The photographers around
the table were bragging about the trophies they had
shot that day. Collectively they had bagged the rear of
one Cape buffalo, the possible tail of the elusive Colobus
monkey, three wart hogs, a Masai sheepherder, and three
marabou storks eating garbage outside the lodge
kitchen.
I said I was returning to my room when Vern
shouted to my husband, “You aren’t going to let your
wife roam out there in the darkness by herself with all
that wildlife, are you?” My husband rose. “Of course
not,” he said. My heart swelled. He motioned to a
ranger with a bow and arrow standing near the door to
escort me to my quarters.
“Photo opportunity!” yelled June. “Don’t miss
it.” The group scurried like newborn field mice.
Cameras appeared and the entire table of
photographers twisted viewfinders and adjusted lenses
and light meters to capture the ranger with a bow and
arrow and Erma in her Banana Republic garb en route
to her room.
Later, when the slide was flashed on our home
screen, our children were underwhelmed. “Mom
doesn’t look real happy,” said one.
“That’s because she’s thinking about her poor

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children sitting at home eating frozen dinners and

being culturally deprived.”
“That’s it!” said the other one. “It’s guilt. We
could change that, you know. Just take us with you the
next time.”
It would serve ’em right.

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Picking a Date for the
Family Trip

How about the first week of summer vacation?

“T can’t get a sub for my paper route.”
The second week?
“My boss takes his vacation.”
Third week?
“Football practice starts.”
Fourth week?
“T got tickets for a concert.”
Fifth week?
“My dental work cannot be postponed again.”

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“I have to be here when they paint the house.”

Sixth week?
“Bad. Prestons are going out of town. I’m sitting.”
Seventh week?
“Who is nuts enough to travel on a holiday
weekend?”
Eighth week?
“T’m between paychecks and can’t afford it.”
Ninth week?
“That won’t give me time to get new underwear
for everyone.”
Tenth week?
“That’s our busy month at the drive-in. They’d
kill me.”
Eleventh week?
“That’s when the Cramdens go and they sit our dog.”
Twelfth week?
Sroo hot.”
“Besides, we have school the next morning after
we get back.”
“I won’t have to time to do the laundry.”
“Do we have to go?”
“Hold it! This is the date we are all going on a
family vacation. No one will be excused for any reason.
We are all going to play together and have a fun time or
I’m going to break a few heads!”

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 Rafting Down the
Grand Canyon

Standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon,

our family looked like an ad for constipation. I had
never seen a more surly or unhappy group in my life.
Our daughter was ticked off because it was four in
the morning and she didn’t want to be there. Her
brothers were fighting because one of them was staring
at the other one, and my husband didn’t know how he
could possibly be on a raft on the Colorado River for
six days with only a gym bag of clothes. “They expect
me to survive with a bathing suit, a pair of shorts, and

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three pairs of underwear? I pack more clothes than that

to go to the bathroom.” I was angry because the last
thing I told all of them before leaving home was to wear
sensible hiking shoes and there they were in thongs that
an eight-mile hike on a rocky trail would rip to shreds.
Unless, of course, they didn’t fall and break their necks
first.
We were together all of five minutes before the
entire group pushed ahead and left me behind like a
bad habit. As I picked my way slowly down the rocky
trail to where a raft awaited, I thought a lot about why
we were doing this. Our teenagers did not want to be
with us. They had made that clear. They wanted to be
home working on their book, Parents Dearest.
A sharp pain in my right knee got my attention. We
should have stopped having children when we had the
majority vote. Now it was three to two. That meant
they had control of the phone, car radio, and all other
lines of communication. They manipulated every aspect
of our lives. They literally controlled the budget and the
spending. They had the last word on all major
decisions. This vacation was the first undemocratic
thing we had done in years. Why didn’t it feel good?
Another pain started in my left knee and I found myself
grabbing rocks for support with every step.
About four miles down the trail, the sun was
beginning to get through to me. My water supply was
gone and my knees were killing me. I crawled into a
small cave for shade to contemplate my future... if I

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had one. My toes felt like they were coming through the
end of my hiking boots. Surely, the three kids would be
saying by this time, “Our mother has stretch marks over
ninety percent of her body thanks to us. We’re a family.
All of you people can go down the river if you want, but
we’re going back on the trail and rescue our mother
who has sacrificed so much for us.”
An hour passed before I sensed a vibration of sorts
coming from the ground. It turned out to be a string of
drag-in mules carrying supplies to the bottom of the
canyon. I hitched a ride, thinking somewhere along the
way I’d meet my family coming to search for me.
Actually, my husband did get worried and brought
water, but by this time I was on the back of a mule.
The kids were all on the raft. As I approached, I
heard my daughter’s mouth. “Mom7’s always late. She
ruins everything.”
As I fell over the large rubber pontoon, the captain
of the boat said, “You’re the first person to ever start
down the canyon on foot and end up on her—”
“Shut up and drive,” I said tiredly.
People who have never rafted down the Colorado
River wonder what it is you do all day for a week on a
boat that holds sixteen people.
Mostly, you float down a patch of brown river
dwarfed by mile-high canyons of rock on either side. It
is one of the most humbling, unforgettable experiences
you will ever know as you ease by these stone cathedrals
that turn from purples to reds to golds in the afternoon

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sun. Occasionally, you sweep through rapids of jagged

rocks that sometimes drop the boat off into swirling
foam for the ride of your life. From time to time you
stop and explore caves and waterfalls and spot wild
mustangs and burros that stare curiously at these
outsiders. A swim in the Colorado is to say hello to
hypothermia.
About three days out, a nice woman from Maine
asked, “Do you have any children?”
I assured her I did and pointed to the boy lashed in
place by ropes on the pontoon as far away from the
group as he could get. Another boy was at the opposite
end of the boat reading a comic book, and the third
child was getting a serious tan. “And your husband?”
she queried. I pointed him out.
“Oh my,” she exclaimed. “He’s the one we see going
to the Porta Potti every night in his bathrobe and bedroom
slippers. I thought we were supposed to rough it.”
“Believe me when I tell you he is suffering.” I
smiled.
She thought it was wonderful when families were
as close as we were.
Every evening when we made camp, the ritual was
the same. Everyone was responsible for putting up his
own cot under the stars, waiting for the potties to be
erected and for a waterfall to become available for
showers. I tried to avoid excessive mothering. I really
did. One night as I was in the Porta Potti, I heard a
large hawk screeching across the sky and the voice of

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my daughter saying to a friend, “I have to go. I hear my

mother calling.” I bit my tongue to keep from yelling,
“T heard that! You’re grounded until you give birth.”
My husband had to admit the food was great and
the scenery breathtaking, but he was still fighting the
primitive facilities. A good day for him was when he
found a rock with an indentation in it for his
biodegradable soap near a shower/waterfall.
On about the sixth night, we heard rumbles and
saw dark clouds gathering ominously above us as we
erected our cots. Someone got the bright idea to seek
protection from the rain on the ledges of some nearby
caves.
“Not me,” I said and positioned my cot in a barren
patch of desert alone from the group. “There are bats
in those caves and I’m not about to have fifty thousand
of them part my hair.”
My son was humiliated. “Dad,” he whined,
“Mom?’s acting weird again. Make her come in the cave
like everyone else.”
There’s something wrong with bats that I can’t put
my finger on. They’re . . . they’re engineered wrong. All
wrong. They never stand on their feet like other
mammals. They hang out. They always look like they
never use a napkin. I hate that. And any mother with
nipples in her armpits just isn’t thinking. I felt safer in
the open desert.
As I looked up at the black sky, I yelled out in the
darkness to my husband, “Are you eating something?”

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(I knew he had brought his food stash.)

“I am eating dried apricots from my survival bag.”
“T’m starving.”
“You told me you didn’t like anything with fur on it.”
“You’re not going to share, are you>”
My response was his lips smacking in the dark.
I hoped the batteries burned out on his portable
electric toothbrush.
On the last day, everyone pitched in and prepared
to take everything out of the canyon we had brought in,
from the large rubber rafts to a chewing gum wrapper.
To the observer, our kids could have been returning
from an orphans’ picnic.
I did a lot of thinking about our children on that
trip—especially about the wisdom of traveling with
them.
My conclusion is, you can leave your children
endowments, stocks, a moldy fur coat, and the family
silverware, but you cannot pass on to them the
memories that have contributed immeasurably to your
life—your travels. It’s a one-owner legacy, the one thing
that goes with you when you go.
Parents think a lot about their legacy to their kids.
What would they do with their money? One would take
up residence in a Tower Records store, another would
fill an entire house with cosmetics, and the other would
buy a car that would never get any farther than the
cement blocks it was hoisted on in the driveway. After
that trip, we decided to spend their money for them by

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showing them the world. Let them amass their own

riches.
We’re not talking Brady Bunch here. We’re a real
family . . . remember? In Ireland, the two brothers had
an argument over a bicycle, split, and didn’t see each
other for two weeks. In Hawaii, they learned by saying
“Charge it to room 411,” they had the power of the
universe.
In the African bush, one fell in the Zambezi River
that was crawling with hippopotamus. One ran with the
bulls through the narrow streets in Pamplona and told
me later so I could have a heart attack in leisure.
My husband has me on film running behind a son
who is being lifted over a Mexican bay in a parasail,
yelling, “Why are you killing your mother?”
Their hotel bedrooms looked like Beirut, they were
always the last ones to board the plane, and they used
their passports for scratch pads for phone numbers, but
somehow we made it.
If we have given them a legacy at all, I hope it is a
desire to see the world and meet some of the people
with whom they share this planet in peace.
If that were true, I would never again worry that
they would end up with nothing.
There were a lot of vacations we took after the
Grand Canyon trip . . . vacations that could have made
us look better in print. There were rare moments when
we actually functioned like a close family. But I chose
the raft trip for a reason.

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 Rafting Down the Grand Canyon

This was the summer of our discontent with one

another. We didn’t hang out together. We rarely talked
or ate with one another. We didn’t even seem to need
one another. But we survived it. (I gained three pounds
and lost four toenails.) But something important was
happening to us on this trip that we didn’t even realize
was happening.
For the first time we could remember, we were a
family who gave one another space to be ourselves. We
had never done that before. It was as if we all knew that
this was the end of a chapter in our lives and the
beginning of a new one. The umbilical cord that had
bound us together as a unit for nearly two decades was
about to be severed. I realized for the first time it was as
frightening for our teenagers to contemplate as it was
for us as parents. They had been dealing with it with
hostility. We had countered with one last rush of
superiority.
From that day on, our lives would all turn in
different directions. In many ways it was like the
Colorado River. It would wind and twist with a promise
of a new experience at each turn of the bend. There
would be smooth waters for long stretches, then
suddenly a patch of rough rapids that would test us and
take away our control. It would demand everything we
had to hang on and get back on course again.
We had had hours on the trip to think and to
observe one another away from stereos, telephones,
schedules, friends, and conversations that sounded

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more like bulletins. What better place than the solitude

of a river.
It would be several years before we planned
another family vacation. We all had a lot of thinking
and growing up to do... a lot of things to prove to
ourselves. But strangely, this was the trip that we all
talk about and remember, the pictures we pore over in
family albums. We have never said it to one another,
but it was the last summer of the child . . . the last
summer of the parents. From that day on, all moved to
become contemporaries.

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 “Let Me Entertain You”

I live in Arizona where tourism is big business.

One night at one of our popular cowboy steak
houses, I watched a group of visiting Japanese men.
They had watched a shoot-out, visited a saloon, and
allowed themselves to be photographed wearing
cowboy hats and six-shooters over their hips. When
they sat down to dinner, one of them must have
ordered his steak well-done, because he was served a
dusty boot on a plate. Just as their steak knives
were poised over their meat, a waitress came by with a
pair of scissors and cut all their neckties in half. They
just sat there—not speaking—as she stapled half of their

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ties to the ceiling with their calling cards.

They had to wonder how we won the war.
Countries are not unlike hosts and hostesses. The
first thing they try to do for visitors is to entertain them.
Historic sites and cathedrals are a given, but they want
to send you home with something you will remember.
I have discovered most guides who want you to
have a good time put you on the back of an animal and
take your picture. It doesn’t matter what kind of an
animal: camel, mule, horse, or elephant. Anything, so
long as it terrifies the rider.
We aren’t in a country twelve hours before we are
perched on the back of some beast of burden. We rode
mules to the top of Henri Christophe’s Citadel in Haiti
and mules down narrow paths in Greece’s Santorini.
On Easter Island, we rode them wild.
If you want to see the enchanted ruins of Petra in
Jordan, you barter for a mule the size of a dog with a
little wooden saddle and a raggy blanket. At the end of
an hour you feel like a wishbone at a Thanksgiving
dinner.
Like the Japanese in cowboy hats, guides enjoy
nothing better than dressing you up and taking your
picture.
In Jordan, my husband was outfitted in Yasir
Arafat headgear. He looked like an Irishman wearing a
tablecloth. In Zimbabwe, we wore diseased animal
skins and danced around a campfire with shields and
spears. In Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, we posed as

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 “Let Me Entertain You”

a Viking couple with horns growing out of our heads.

And in Australia, I have a picture of a koala bear
zonked out‘of its mind from the eucalyptus leaves
hanging around my neck.
Every country comes alive for tourists after dark.
New Zealand’s Maori dancers stand in front of your
face and stick out their tongues like serpents, and you
don’t know what happiness is until you’ve sat through a
comedy store in Rio where all the jokes are told in
Portuguese.
Many countries you visit like to enlighten you on
their history with a musical pageant. This happened in
Ireland. Normally, it might be the hottest ticket in
town. But when you have just flown for eight hours,
climbed on a bus, and been fed an eight-course
banquet in a castle, it is not high on your list of things
to do.
I knew I was in trouble when they opened the
presentation with the arrival of the Celts in 300 B.c. I
was hoping for something more current, like the visit of
John F. Kennedy in 1963.
By the time the Danes pillaged the land in 1014
and the potato crop failed in 1846-47, I had dozed off.
I didn’t wake up until Padraig Pearse led the final
uprising in 1916 and brought independence to the
country.
Folk dances are popular. So are cabarets, ballets,
and circuses. Inhibitions are thrown to the wind. You’ll
never see these people again, so you put on a hula skirt

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and shimmy or stand on stage and yodel with a Swiss

band.
I have made an absolute fool of myself in most of
the major capitals of the world. I’m a tourist and I act
like one.
Every country has its share of comics. At the
Folies-Bergére I was sitting near the stage when the
emcee leaned over with a blinding spotlight following
him and said, “Madame, would you be so kind as to
seal this envelope for me?” I stuck out my tongue to
lick the flap and he announced loudly, “Ah, I see you
are French.”
In Istanbul, it was Shecky Abdul. His entire act
was to play an international audience by drawing them
on the stage and having them set their respective
cultures back two hundred years.
One must look upon all of this as a growth
experience—performed before people you will never see
again.
There’s a bar in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico where
they string you up by your feet, hoist you into the air,
and you hang upside down next to a cardboard marlin
who is wearing dark glasses and holding a fishing pole
while they snap your picture. You have to ask yourself,
“Do I need to have this good a time?”

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 Antiquity

The big thing to remember about “antiquity” is

that it is never found close to the parking lot. I don’t
care if it’s an old monastery, a fort, a ruin, a city, or an
old pot, you have to walk a country mile to see it.
I respect history as much as the next person, but to
climb eight hundred forty steps to lie on your back and
kiss a stone that doesn’t kiss you back is not a must-see
on my itinerary.
The fact that Americans drag around the world by
the busloads to glimpse the past probably has
something to do with the youth of our own country. We
revere anything older than George Burns.

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My husband, a former history teacher, is disposed

to read every single sign on every single exhibit in every
single museum. If there is a button to activate a voice,
he will push it. If there is a guide who will explain how
paint dries, he will listen. If there is a mountaintop
where he can view Islamic graffiti, he will scale it.
I gave Stonehenge ten minutes.
It’s not that I don’t respect age. I respect anything
that has been through children and is still standing. A
mother cannot view the Acropolis without observing
that if just once the Athens jousting team had won the
city championship, they would have trashed that site in
ten minutes and there would be nothing left to see. It’s
just that you have to pay such exorbitant prices. I didn’t
mind taking a train ride to see Machu Picchu in Peru, a
cable car to visit Masada in Israel, or a cab ride to walk
among Jordan’s Roman ruins at Gerash. But those are
exceptions. Most trips to antiquity are death marches. I
spent a half day crawling up a mountain of cinders in
Indonesia to do what? To stare into a hole called
Krakatau. It looked exactly like the big hole I stared into
in Italy called Vesuvius. The problem is I don’t see a
volcano all year. Then for two weeks, that’s all I see, and
I get burned out.
Same with museums. Same with churches. Same
with ruins.
My husband and I do not look for the same things
on these trips. He is focused, asks questions about the
size of the bricks and the date the cathedral was

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restored. He maintains a diary of where he has been

and what he has seen.
My observations include the IQs of women who
wear heels on these excursions, how late the gift shop
will remain open, and how do we know if Mary, the
mother of God, really lived in that house? Did they find
monogrammed towels marked BM for Blessed Mother?
I get the feeling that in many countries, especially
those in the Mideast, male guides are put off by
Western women’s assertiveness and independence.
They are used to women in a subservient role who wear
gray, keep their mouths shut, and hang on to every
male word.
Never was it more obvious than our visit to
Ephesus, a group of Roman ruins in Turkey. At ten in
the morning the temperature was 104 degrees. Our
guide was a history buff who never tired of telling long,
complicated stories about each rock. The word
“menopause” had no meaning for him. Every two
minutes he would stop and launch into a long historical
harangue in Michener-like fashion, going all the way
back to 88 B.c. Somehow he must have sensed that he
did not have my complete attention. As he lectured, I
was either searching for a restroom or a water fountain.
From time to time I would stalk a bird to catch its
shade when it landed. As I collapsed on a rock bench in
the amphitheater, he said, “I have a story that will
interest you.” I brightened.
“This is the spot where Artemis-Cybele was

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worshipped,” he said. “They were a group of women

who were dedicated warriors—archetypal women’s
libbers.” He paused and his eyes met mine. “These
women had sex with men once a year so that the race
might not die out. The male children were left to die at
birth.” He had my attention. “Artemis is always shown
as an Amazon,” he continued, “one breast bare, the
peplum draped over the right shoulder to hide the scar
where the other breast had been cut off to allow full
freedom for the bow arm.” I nodded blankly. “But then
you could relate to that.” He smiled.
I looked down at my own bust and wondered what
he meant by a crack like that. And all that because I
opened my own car door.
When the opportunity came up for a trip to
Greece, my husband was ecstatic.
“Don’t you want to see the site of the first
marathon?” he asked. I shook my head.
“Don’t you want to see the Temple of Apollo at
Delphi where the oracles hung out?” I said no.
“Do you want to die without seeing something
older than yourself?”
We got a guide who was right out of central
casting. He wore a cap and a scarf under his tweed
jacket, and he puffed on a pipe he could never keep lit.
He had a way of demanding your complete
attention when he spoke. As we filed on and off buses
at each historic site, I felt like I was in the fourth grade
on a field trip to a power plant. I was becoming

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paranoid that everyone on the tour had asked a

question except me and he knew it. I knew that one day
when I least suspected it, he would glare at me and ask,
“You! The one with the Dixie cup of ice! How do you
think the excavations at the palace of Knossos,
Gortyna, compare with those of Phaistos in the
Mesara?”
More than once our eyes had met. We were in
Thebes and down to the last day before returning to
Athens. The pressure was more than I could bear. My
time was running out. There were perhaps thirty of us
standing around when there was a silence and he
looked straight at me and asked, “Have you no
questions?”
He didn’t want to hear my real questions. Since I
had arrived in Greece, I wondered why all the male
nude statues were missing the same sexual biological
appendage. What happened to all of them? Were they
stored somewhere? Were the museums denied funds
until they removed them? Did the militant Amazon
women of Turkey hold their convention in Greece? Was
it the first thing to crumble? What?
Instead, I said quietly, “Does this lion I’m leaning
against have any historical significance?”
Thirty people stiffened in anticipation of what was
coming. He glared at me for several seconds before he
spoke. Then he said, “You were not paying attention. I
told you not two seconds ago it marks Thebes’ defeat
by Philip of Macedonia in 338.”

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I mentioned my husband keeps a diary. To show

you how crazy Americans can get over antiquity, we
were in Spain and someone in the bakery one day
mentioned a great old church called St. Lucas. We got
in the car and my husband handed me a sheaf of papers
from a yellow legal tablet with directions on how to get
there. Fasten your seat belts.

Go NW from Palagrugel—C-255 (road to Le Bisbal)

About 5 k turn rt. to torrent—3k to dead end
Turn left to pals (14c castle/tower)
Continue on NW plus RV. ter to Torrdella (13
castle/view)
Return same road to RV ter. Turn rt. at once!
At Serra de Daro turn left to Ullestret (11 c church)
Continue on to Vulpellach (14 c castle)
Take Main Rd. rt. W. to Le Bisbal, go left SW to
Cruilles. 1st rd. to Cassia de la Selva. Same direction
next rd. turn r. to San Saduri to Monella (?)
Turn south to S. Sebastian—Then La Franc
(lighthouse) to Callella to Cabo Roig.

A footnote. When we arrived, St. Lucas was

closed. The church was built in 1936. We were born
before that.

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 Sick

There is nothing more miserable in this world than

to arrive in paradise looking like your passport picture.
Yet our doctor will bear us out on this. Our entire
medical file is composed of vacation-induced maladies,
injuries, and mysterious fevers. We return from a trip
sicker than we left. His medical opinion is that if we
don’t stop relaxing and start staying home, travel will
eventually kill us.
Actually, he is probably right. We have paid as
much as $300 a day to throw up in a sink shaped like a
seashell. I have a history of packing three bathing suits
for a trip to the beach and pulling the draperies in my

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room because I couldn’t bear to look at daylight. I lived

for a Caribbean cruise to St. Thomas during which you
eat eight meals a day, only to wallow in my bunk eating
dry crackers and drinking clear liquids.
I don’t know what it is—the excitement or the
water, the food or the change—but my entire
recollection of Santiago, Chile, is lying in a hotel room
watching Mr. Ed, the talking horse, spewing out one-
liners in Spanish. All I wanted to do was to go home
and die in my own bed where maids didn’t keep
running in and out with clean towels, but my husband
said no, “We can’t go home. The airline charges $75 a
ticket to change the reservation, and you don’t want to
know what it takes to return a two-week rental car
before its time.”
I said if he were sick we’d go home, and he said,
“That’s because when I get sick, I get sicker than you.”
Hold that thought. I’d like to tell you about Peru.
We were on our way to Machu Picchu and flew into
Cuzco where the altitude is eleven thousand feet. It was
a landing to take your breath away ... assuming you had
any left. No sooner had we checked into our hotel than
we were approached by a waiter carrying two cups of
tea with cocaine leaves floating in it. Holy Nancy
Reagan! What to do! Before I could “just say no,” he
assured us it was wise to drink it. It would make us
sleepy and as we rested, our bodies could become
acclimated to the altitude.
My husband drifted off right away. I, on the other

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 Sick

hand, figured I had a few hours of daylight before the

gift shops closed. Besides, I could sleep at home.
The next morning my husband could not get out
of bed. His flulike symptoms made him headachy and
listless. “It’s probably just flu,” I said.
“My fingernails are turning blue,” he said.
“It’s probably more than flu,” I said. We called the
hotel doctor, who flung open the windows, put an
oxygen mask on my husband’s face, and proclaimed
him a victim of altitude sickness.
Between dry, parched lips, he summoned me to
come closer to his bed and whispered, “We’ve come all
this way to see Machu Picchu and I don’t want you to
miss it just because I am at death’s door. Don’t worry
about me being here all by myself in a foreign city
where I don’t speak the language and am at the mercy
of a phone that doesn’t work half the time. I want you
to board the train and go to Machu Picchu and have a
wonderful time.”
“OK,” I said, and I was out of there.
Later, when we talked of the experience (and God
how he talked of it), the concern wasn’t that my
husband was going to die alone, it was the agony of
paying all that money to stare at ugly wallpaper all day.
According to our doctor’s log, our journeys have
given us bruised kidneys, blackened toenails that
eventually fell off, blurred vision, rashes, pulmonary
disorders, chills and fever, conjunctivitis, dehydration
from diarrhea, mysterious insect bites that refused to

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heal, lymph gland infections, sunburned feet from

whale watching in the Baja, and a mysterious tropical
disease that took six weeks out of my life.
Some illnesses are givens. I know that whenever I
am at sea, I can be found at the railing hopefully with
the wind at my back. No matter how many precautions
I take, I still cannot tolerate the motion of a boat or
ship. We had the kids with us one year and decided to
cruise out to a little French island called Guadeloupe in
the Caribbean.
It was a three-hour trip. The boat had two classes:
first and tourist. My husband announced, “Kids, I
think your mother would be more comfortable in first
class. Maybe there wouldn’t be so much motion. I
know you’re saving money, so you can go tourist if you
like.”
Well, you would not believe the jokes that ensued.
“Mom can’t be classless for three hours? What does she
think we’re going to do in tourist? Ride next to live
chickens? Who’s going to take her place at the oars?”
I ignored them and we paid the extra thirty bucks
to sit in an air-conditioned cabin with soft seats and a
TV set. The classes were divided by a curtain.
Five minutes away from the dock, I grabbed two
barf bags and hit the floor, flat on my back. It was not a
pretty sight. Hearing laughter, I looked up, and
standing over my chilled, sweating, nauseous, green
body were the kids. “So this is first class,” they chirped.
“Nice seat you got, Mom. Too bad you’re missing

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 Sick

an old ‘Perry Mason’ rerun on your TV set.”

If the environment doesn’t get you and the water
doesn’t do you in, you have one last obstacle to clear
before you can come home well: food.
You have no idea what you are eating. One day in
Africa, we were having a box lunch. As I picked up a
piece of meat, I asked, “Does anyone know what kind
of an animal has a one-and-a-half-inch thigh?”
Everyone stopped eating, returned the meat to the box,
and hit for the fruit.
Travelers feel the world is so homogenized that
there is no place they can go without getting American
food. This isn’t really true. I could hardly wait until we
got to Israel to sample all that New York deli cuisine—
you know, the sandwiches with two pounds of pastrami
between the softest rye bread on the planet with dollops
of hot mustard and a crisp kosher pickle on the side.
Forget it. Israel is a whole lamb on a rotisserie dripping
fat in the restaurant window, hummus made out of
chickpeas, falafel, and tasteless bagels the size of
hubcaps.
Most countries use very little meat in their diets.
They serve a lot of fish. I have the feeling that I am
eating bait most of the time.
And it works in reverse. Can you imagine what
Fatburgers look like to a man from New Delhi? I was
seated on a plane next to a man from Japan one day
when lunch was served. He didn’t speak a word of
English, so there was no warning him when he picked

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up his knife and fork and began to saw through a large,

firm pat of butter. He properly balanced a bite of it on
the fork, deposited it in his mouth, and began to chew
slowly. .
Throughout the years, I have set up my own rules
for eating (or not eating) food:

Never eat anything you can’t pronounce.

Beware of food that is described as, “Some
Americans say it tastes like chicken.”
If a country does not have one single head of
cattle, no ranges, and no cowboys, don’t order
beef.
This is no time to be a sport. When they tell you
the skin of what you are eating makes wonderful
shoes and handbags, leave it.
Resist eating anything that when dropped on the
floor excites a dog.
In countries where men wear red checkered
tablecloths on their heads, don’t order Italian.

Someone did a survey on the number of travelers

who suffered from some physical ailment while
traveling. It seems sixty-two percent of vacationers
come down with upset stomachs, heartburn,
indigestion, diarrhea, and sunburn.
Sometimes it’s carelessness. Other times you have
only to mention one word that will bring you to your
knees ... MEXICO!

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 Mexico

My young son and I lay side by side on the double

bed with all the curtains drawn, casting the casita into
darkness.
The door opened and a blinding ray of sunlight
caused me to grab a wet towel off the nightstand and
cover my eyes, and him to bury his head in the pillow.
“Why don’t you come to the beach?” asked my
husband brightly. “It’s beautiful!”
“How far is it from this room?”
“Twenty ... thirty yards, max.”
“That’s too far from the bathroom,” I groaned.
“Shut the door.”

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 Erma Bombeck

“What about you, sport? I thought you wanted to

go parasailing?”
My son threw a pillow at the door just before it
slammed.
We had been in Mazatlan only an hour or so when
both of us were struck down with Montezuma’s
revenge.
Forget the fact that I would go home looking like I
had been bled white by leeches. Forget lazy days on the
beach and romantic nights listening to strolling
mariachis. Forget that two dollars would buy me the
leather coat of my dreams. I was stuck for a week in this
dark room watching cartoons of Tom and Jerry chase
each other, with Spanish subtitles.
My mother, who was also on the trip with my
father, poked her head in the door. “Bill tells me you
want to stay in this depressing room all day. You missed
a wonderful lunch. I had a cheese crisp and a large salad.”
“Mother, you’re not supposed to eat the lettuce or
the tomatoes.”
“I don’t believe all that nonsense. Here, I brought
you both a bag of tortilla chips from the dining room.
Be careful. They’re greasy.”
The bag landed on the bed between my son and
me. It took only a few seconds for the odor of the
animal fat to reach our nostrils before we both bolted to
the bathroom.
“Are we bonding yet?” he said, raising his head
weakly.

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 Mexico

“Any minute now,” I said.

A commercial that I had seen on television came to
mind. It showed a Hispanic family who were at
Disneyland eating hot dogs and cotton candy. They
were holding their stomachs and looking miserable.
Then a pink substance oozed down over the screen.
When it cleared, the family was smiling and saying,
“Gracias Kaopectate.” I used to think about that
commercial a lot. Was it possible that people coming to
our country couldn’t drink the water and suffered
stomach cramps during their entire stay? I wanted to
believe that.
I love Mexico. It is our Arizona neighbor, and
every chance I get I whip across the border at Nogales
and poke through the richness of its creativity. I’m there
maybe four or five hours before I begin to dehydrate
and I must reenter the United States for a drink of
water.
It’s funny about water. When I am home I have to
force myself to drink three glasses a day. When it costs
$1.49 a bottle, I am like a sponge.
A friend of ours rented a house one summer in San
Miguel de Allende. I made up my mind I was going to
be super-careful. I rinsed out my toothbrush in bottled
water. I shut my eyes and closed my lips while
showering so that not a drop of water invaded my
temple of fluoride.
We boiled large tubs of water and used it to make
coffee. We washedand rinsed our dishes in boiled

Lig
 Erma Bombeck

water. At a pharmacy we bought a special chemical to

soak fresh fruits and vegetables to kill off anything that
might infest our system. I chewed so many Pepto-
Bismol tablets my teeth turned pink.
One day my husband asked, “Want to go for a
swim?”
“How far is the pool from the house?”
“Fifteen... twenty yards tops.”
“That’s too far,” I said.
There are some people who have stomachs of iron.
They can drink water from the tap, eat street food, and
feel nothing. My mother is one of those people. She’ll
try anything. She’s the only one I know who leaves an
airline and says to the stewardess, “Compliments to the
chef.”
I remember when we returned from Mazatlan she
dropped off at the drugstore to get something for her
constipation.
Is that sick or what!

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 Traveling with Parents

Several years ago when I was a roving correspondent

for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” I traveled to the
Grand Canyon to do a story on the lack of facilities in
national parks to accommodate the handicapped. The
parks belong to everyone, and being limited by crutches
or wheelchairs should in no way diminish the
enjoyment or appreciation of the surroundings.
To prove the point, I sat on a ledge of the canyon
with a young blind man from Northern Arizona
University, Flagstaff. I asked him what he “saw” on his
descent into the canyon.
My eyes were wet with tears as he described

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 Erma Bombeck

hugging the large boulders that held the heat of the sun
long after it had gone down. He told of how he heard
giant hawks overhead and felt the coolness of their
shadows. From the echoes, he gleaned the scope and
depth of the canyon. He felt the winds stir the brush
along the trail and scooped up the cold water of the
restless Colorado that carved out a place for itself on
the canyon floor. He even felt the layers of rock that left
their own imprint of time and glacier activity.
When he finished, I vowed that never again would
I believe that people are too old or too incapacitated to
travel and to enjoy where they are.
When my parents were younger, they traveled a
lot. Later in their lives, when my father had difficulty in
getting around, they announced their traveling days
were over.
I thought they were too young to retire their passports
and told them so. Why should they get to sit at home and
live the good life while the rest of us were out there kicking
suitcases in a checkout line, climbing on and off tour
buses, filling out landing forms, and struggling with
language. Besides, we had seen too many older people on
our travels climbing over rocks, riding camels, scaling
mountains, and putting in fifteen-hour days to know that if
you really wanted to see the world, it was doable.
My mother said it would be nice to travel with us,
but we should pick a nice, easy vacation so they could
keep up. Something not too weird that would challenge
us but still be relaxing for them.

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 Traveling with Parents

“I was hoping you’d say that,” I said.

“So where are we going?”
“Down the Amazon.”
Now, before every amateur traveler in the world
rushes out and plans a vacation with parents, you must
ask yourself a few questions and answer them honestly.

1. Did your mother-in-law wear a black armband

to the wedding?
2. Do they still think Hawaii is a foreign country?
3. Are you still arguing with your mother over
whether a three-year-old should have a pacifier
implant?
4. Do your parents tell you to sit up straight and
not talk with food in your mouth?
5. Do you have anything in common beyond
occupying the planet Earth?

Happily, the four of us genuinely like one another

and travel well together.
We flew to Manaus where the dark waters of
Brazil’s Rio Negro meet the muddy waters of the Rio
Solimdes to form the Amazon. Then we transferred to a
canoe where we eased our way through cocoa trees,
rubber plantations, and channels of tropical birds and
huge water lilies. Actually, the pace was pretty leisurely,
but back in the city my dad ran out of gas. Shopping to
him was on the same social plateau as mud wrestling.
He said, “I’ll wait for you here on the park bench. Take

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your time.” Thus began my father’s own private

adventures. From that moment, his vacation took on a
life of its own. As he whiled away his afternoons on the
bench, he was entertained by a snake charmer, treated
to a political debate, and hit on by two hookers.
In every city we visited, on every trip we took, he
staked out a spot in the center of town and absorbed
the sights and sounds of its people. If we wanted to
know what was going on, we asked him.
He wanted desperately to see the large statue of
Christ the Redeemer that rises one hundred feet into
the air on a peak overlooking Rio. But the train only
took us part of the way up. The rest you had to walk.
That was difficult for him.
It took both of us an hour and a half to make it to
the top, but it was a personal triumph for him, as was
the entire trip. He and my mother display the proof of
their efforts on their kitchen wall. They had their
picture taken and mounted on the tackiest plate in
South America. They paid $15 for it. It’s worth a
million in memories.
Vacations are nothing more than a series of
“moments.” These are special times that you remember
in between all the exhaustion of getting from one place
to another. That trip with my parents was to be the
beginning of a lot of trips we took together. It was also a
time of discovery. We were seeing one another as
friends.
I discovered my mother could carry on a conversation

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 Traveling with Parents

with a street sign. She never knew a stranger. One day on a

boat trip outside Rio, she was “chatting” with a family
from Argentina. Mom had a bandanna over her mouth
and two imaginary six-shooters in her hands, and they
were nodding like they understood what she was saying.
I can only assume she was telling them she was from
Arizona, home of cowboys and Indians. Then again,
she could have been telling them about a bad meal she
got in Rio where the owner overcharged and she felt
like wasting him. Who knows?
In Ireland, my father never really understood how
bed-and-breakfast works. When we pulled the car into
the driveway of a private home, he said, “I don’t want
to bother these people. Let’s go to a hotel.” We tried to
explain to him what he suggested was a lot like
checking into a Marriott and saying, “Look, if you’re
busy, we'll just sleep in the car and eat a candy bar.”
“That’s what these people do for a living,” I
explained. “They want guests. Look at them. They’re
coming out to the car to meet us, and they’re smiling.”
He still wasn’t convinced. He went into his
bedroom and didn’t come out until we loaded up the
car in the morning. Then he apologized to them for
dirtying two towels. So much for culture exchange.
One day in Spain, I said to them, “How would you
like to see a bullfight in Barcelona?”
“I’ve seen it on TV,” said my dad. “It’s too
bloody.”
“You love Ava Gardner, don’t you?”

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 Erma Bombeck

SYese
“Ava Gardner loved bullfights.”
“She did?”
“Never missed them,” I said.
“We could possibly last through one,” he said.
Actually, there were six bulls to be fought that day,
and like the child who eventually turns into the mother,
I got them settled and gave them their instructions.
“You have to understand, this is a national pastime in
this country, and they do not view it with the same
horror or disdain as Americans do. We have to respect
that. All I’m asking is that you refrain from making
comments about ‘What kind of animals are these
people?’ and ‘How would they like it if bulls in capes
stuck spears in their necks?’ OK?”
They nodded their heads in agreement.
When the first bull was released, Mother said
aloud, “You poor thing. If you knew what I know.”
“Mother!” I snapped.
“Sorry,” she said.
When an ear was presented to a woman in a box
just down from us, my father shook his head from side
to side.
“All the meat goes to the orphanage,” I said,
patting his hand.
For the next five encounters, we heard absolutely
nothing from either of them. Not a peep. When I
turned around to tell them it was time to go, both were
sitting there with their eyes closed.

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 Traveling with Parents

You never dwell on what you can’t do on a

vacation, but what you can do. My dad didn’t have to
play St. Andrews golf course in Scotland. Seeing it was
enough. He didn’t have to roam the Cliffs of Moher in
Ireland. It was enough to feel the mist on his face and
watch the birds dart in and out. Just sitting around on
park benches, parking lots, walls, and sidewalk cafes, he
probably absorbed more of the flavor of the country
than we did.
It is important to note my dad didn’t snap a single
picture. He didn’t have to. His memory was an album
of moments he cherished till the day he died.

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 Restrooms

In 1984, I traveled to NASA in Houston to do a

piece on the space shuttle for “Good Morning
America.” If this was to be the Greyhound bus of the
future, I had to know the most important thing about
it: “Where’s the toilet?”
This probably seems insignificant to most people,
but as far as I’m concerned, plumbing is the key to
world power. It is the universal language, the one
essential that binds us all together, the common
denominator that is of the utmost importance to those
of us who share this planet.
One cannot possibly imagine the prestige that will

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 Restrooms

be accorded the nation who perfects a toilet that works.

Toilets were invented by the Romans in the second
century. The very next day, Out of Order signs were
invented.
At NASA, a public relations man directed me to a
large seat in the space capsule that looked like a death
chair. It had a seat belt and head and foot restraints to
compensate for weightlessness in space.
“This is the space toilet,” he said.
“Does this really work?” I asked.
“Not well,” he said reluctantly. “We’ve got a lot of
bugs to work out.”
Five years of research and $12 million worth of
engineering had gone into this mechanism, and it still
didn’t function properly.
I’d like the adventure of going to other planets as
well as the next person, but until they can either come
up with a toilet that functions or a plumber who works
in space on Sundays, I’m not going.

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 Istanbul

Istanbul is a city in Turkey shrouded in mystery,

steeped in history, rich in antiquity, and stubbornly
hanging on to its old-world ambience. And that’s only
the toilets.
Restroom facilities aren’t as important to men as
they are to women. Male travelers tend to focus on
ruins that have withstood time, palaces that harbor
secrets, and religious shrines that have shaped the
destiny of a country.
Women might be interested in all this too if they
had the time. But they have to figure out if you pull a
chain to flush, step on a pedal, push a button, jiggle a

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 Istanbul

handle, or push a detonator on the back of the

commode like you are blowing up a train.
Istanbul is the ultimate restroom experience. I
hardly know where to begin. I’ll start with my back.
Due to a herniated disk, I was in bed for four months
before I embarked on the trip. This is important for you
to know because it explains why my leg muscles were
gone.
Leg muscles are absolutely essential in Istanbul
because all of the restroom facilities are nothing more
than a hole in the floor with two little Arthur Murray
feet etched in the cement on either side of the hole
facing a wall. There is nothing to hang on to. Once
you're down there, you’ve made a serious commit-
ment.
You don’t know despair until you have fallen on
your backside on a (ugh) wet restroom floor in Istanbul
with your English cries for help falling on Turkish ears.
For years, I have been waiting for a travel writer
with the courage to put out a handbook (waterproof, of
course) telling us what to expect in the way of restroom
facilities. They all tap dance around the subject like it’s
not important. To women, it’s right up there with
breathing and a valid passport.
We should know if they’re called loos or WCs. We
should know whether we have to carry our own tissue,
which ones are unisex, and how much money they cost
before we can use them.
If I had been enlightened, I would never have

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asked a man at the gas station in a small village in Africa

if he would give me the key to the restroom.
He looked at me like I had just asked for the keys to
the kingdom of heaven. Instead, he laughed and pointed
to the bush surrounding us. I declined.
A few miles from the station, I asked our driver to
pull over to the side of the road. As I slid back the door
he warned, “Watch out for lion in the ditches. They like
to sleep there.”
I hesitated. “Oh, and if you pick a tree,” he added,
“look up and make sure there is nothing in it.”
If someone had told me a week before that I would
ask a man I had known for only twelve hours to
accompany me to the bathroom, I would have said he
was crazy.
I’m not suggesting restrooms in the United States
are exactly models for the world. Most of the facilities
abroad bear two initials: WC for water closet. You can
figure that out. But can you imagine a foreigner coming
to our country and trying to figure out the little symbols
we use on restroom doors? Even I have trouble with
them. There are Senors—Senoritas, Messieurs—
Mesdames, Cowboys—Cowsgirls, Chiefs—Squaws,
‘Tarzan—Jane.
They get more creative than that. There are
pointers and setters, Samson and Delilah, Romeo and
Juliet, Scarlett and Rhett.
Ever since my husband found me, sans glasses,
with my nose pressed against a restroom door following
the outline of a little figure in a hooped skirt with my

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fingers and asking if that was a skirt or a man wearing a

cape, he cases the place first.
I hate the ones named after animals. I’m not good
with animals. I’m OK with heifers and steers, stallions
and mares, chicks and chicklets. But one night I didn’t
know the difference between a ram and a ewe. We can
never go back to that restaurant again.
At least most American restrooms are free. Many
foreign restrooms are not.
In Istanbul, every restroom is guarded by a little
old man sitting at a card table who charges you a
minimum of 100 lire (about 15 cents) to use an open
pit with no paper, no towels, no soap, and no deep
breathing.
Recently, I read a story that the Soviets in their
move toward capitalism installed their first pay toilet in
Moscow not far from Red Square at a charge of 10
kopeks (about 3 cents). That’s not a capitalistic
moneymaker. Capitalists aren’t that cruel or that
stupid. You show me a pay toilet in the United States
and I will show you a woman in Donna Karan slacks
crawling on her stomach under the door to avoid
paying 10 cents.
Recently, a couple who were going abroad for the
first time visited us. My husband smiled and said,
“What luck! Erma keeps a diary. She can probably give
you some suggestions on what to see.”
“We’ll land in London,” the woman chirped.
I flipped through my notes. “They’re called loos,
dear. Have chain flushes. Take your own tissue. Will

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you hit Germany? The restroom by the Rhine was

adequate. Roller towel was quite soiled. The one in the
department store in West Berlin, however—” |
“What have you got on the Eiffel Tower?” she
asked, moving closer.
“The Eiffel Tower restroom had soap and tissue,
but the lines could throw you into kidney failure.
Switzerland had sparkling mirrors and the locks were
secure on the doors.”
“Is it true what they say about Italy?”
“Every word,’ I said.’ “No paper, graffiti...”
The men just stared at us. To them, it’s a place to
whip in and out. To women, it’s half a day out of their
lives standing in line and wrestling with cumbersome
clothes. It’s funny, but men don’t question why at
public events women have never heard an overture,
never seen a curtain rise on the second act, never heard
the Star-Spangled Banner, never had the luxury of
finding their seats with the lights on. What do they
think we do in there? Kill time? |
We spent a week in Istanbul, a city that is half
Asian, half European. On our return, my husband
regaled friends with his boat trip down the Bosphorus,
his visit to the Blue Mosque, St. Sophia, and the spice
bazaars.
I am still talking about the white marble baroque
palace of Dolmabahce. With all that money, don’t you
think the sultan could have sprung for a real sit-down
toilet?

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 Brochure Speak

Some of the most creative fiction being written

today are travel brochures. They rank right up there
with Michener and Ludlum.
“Tonight, sit back and enjoy a romantic gondola
ride in Venice.” It’s the dream that torments and
eventually seduces those of us in bumper-to-bumper
traffic each morning, drinking coffee out of a foam cup.
We live the fantasy of lying in a boat in the arms of
our husbands (who look twenty years younger in the
dark) while a gondolier with the voice of Placido
Domingo serenades us. There is never a clue that this is
the summer when tourists and gondoliers wear face
masks to filter out the smell of rotting weeds and

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polluting algae that kill fish and create an odor that

could turn off a nymphomaniac.
In brochures, the motorcoach is always a “luxury”
motorcoach, all hotel rooms overlook the bay, large
terrace, and gardens, and every restaurant has “old-
world ambience.”
The following are phrases that have appeared in
travel literature that we bought .. . literally.
“Spacious suites to enjoy as you cruise the
Norwegian fjords”
This is accompanied by a picture of a woman in an
evening dress sitting at a small table while her husband
in a tuxedo pours her a glass of champagne. What the
picture doesn’t indicate is that they have to hoist the
table on the sofa before they can open the door, he is
sitting on the toilet seat lid, the room is below the water
line, the curtains cover a wall, and they are both trolls.
“Bring extra film to photograph the last remaining
Javan rhino recorded by Marco Polo, wild boars, tigers,
leaf monkeys, and two hundred species of birds”
Promises, promises. I let a domestic cow slip right
out of my camera range. That’s too bad because it was
the only animal I saw.
“One could easily spend several days visiting the
more than eighty-six thousand items on display in the
museum”
Which is too bad because the bus will stop for only
twenty minutes.
“Latin Americans do not have the same sense of

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urgency that we from the Northern Hemisphere feel”

Set your alarm for dinner.
“The phrase for ‘Bring me drinking water, please’
is Lete maj ya tafadhali kunyua”
If I could remember that, I’d be smart enough not
to drink the water.
“Leisure afternoon to shop”
This is a contradiction in terms. Shopping is work
if you do it right.
“Food for the adventurous”
I could stay home for that.
“Never swim alone if you suspect the presence of
sharks”
So what do you do? Buy a friend?

The pitches I really love are the ones that say their
tour excursions “aren’t for everyone.” There was one
ad that offered sixteen days in Zimbabwe on a rhino
reconnaissance safari. Another adventure in a brochure
read, “White-water rafting on the powerful Zambezi
River directly under the spectacular Victoria Falls.
Looping low figure eights in a small aircraft over the
great gorge to photograph myriad rainbows shining
through the mist also available.”
For nearly a year, my husband pored through a
brochure of a fishing and wildlife expedition to Alaska.
We were going to cruise along with an escort of
humpback whales. We were going to see the breeding
grounds for fur seals and visit islands rich in waterfowl.

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Giant king and sockeye salmon would jump in the boat,

and bears and moose would line the shores and wave as
we cruised by.
He was like a kid who couldn’t wait for Christmas.
My eyes kept falling on an ominous “Please note”
in small print in the back of the brochure. It read, “Due
to the unique areas visited on this expedition, changes
in the itinerary may be made where necessary or
deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the
passengers. Your expedition director is a professional in
travel and will ensure that the best alternative is
arranged if a change is necessary.”
I got a chill every time I read it.

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 Alaska

In many ways our salmon fishing expedition in the

Bering Sea was a lot like the Broadway production of
Josh Logan’s Mister Roberts.
The ship sailed from oblivion to tedium with stop-
offs at boredom and monotony, the passengers were
always five minutes away from mutiny, and the captain
actually had a palm tree on the deck outside his door.
Two big differences. The ship was considerably
newer than the mythical Navy bucket, the USS
Reluctant, and when expedition passengers were “bad”
they were threatened with shore leave.
My husband, Mister Roberts, booked us passage

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 Erma Bombeck

on the ship because the very word “expedition” made

him crazy. He fantasized he was Marlin Perkins
sedating a rhino with a dart gun from a helicopter. In
his dreams he became Jacques Cousteau pinned by the
winds against the bow of the Calypso cruising into
Tahiti. When he really hallucinated, he was Robert
Redford between the sheets with Meryl Streep.
My first reaction was that I’d pass this vacation up.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You don’t have to fish.
You could join the wildlife explorers or the flora and
fauna team.”
“They sound like vaudeville acts,” I said.
“Trust me on this one, you are going to have the
time of your life. We’re not talking a smelly fishing boat
here. This is a luxury ship with an exercise room, great
cuisine, and whole unstructured days for relaxation.”
On the day our matching red parkas with the
insignia on them, the fanny packs, the caps with the
bills, and the boots arrived, I thought he was going to
pass out from excitement.
I looked at myself in the mirror wearing the full
expedition costume. I could barely stand up, let alone
move. From the rear, I looked like a Disney parking lot.
Ensign Pulver lives.
The trip was doomed from day one. In all fairness,
it really wasn’t the fault of the organization that gale
winds prevented us from boarding the ship at Nome.
The residents there opened their hearts and their
homes, and even provided tour buses so we could see

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Nome’s only tree barely standing in the winds. The

next morning we were bused to Teller.
The ship was anchored offshore and pitched so
badly we were literally pulled from the zodiacs and
dragged aboard. Social amenities were not exchanged
the first night. We all had our heads in the toilets being
ill. Over the intercom we were informed that a lifeboat
drill would take place in five minutes. Three people
showed up. I was not one of them. The doctor was so
sick he gave himself only half a shot in the hip so he
could still function. Seasickness patches in the backs of
the ears could have been costume jewelry for all the
good they did.
There was no one upright for the captain to
welcome at dinner the first night.
Early the next morning as we still clung to our
beds, the intercom made an important announcement.
Since so many of us had missed the lifeboat drill the
day before, we were advised that any time we heard five
bells, it would be a signal to grab for the life jacket and
prepare to evacuate ship.
On day two, all of us crawled from our cabins
and made a stab at social interaction. It wasn’t easy.
The ship was literally divided into three distinct
interest groups. The wildlife people had binoculars
draped around their necks and carried notebooks
everywhere. One man told of how he went without
his lunch for three years to save enough money to
watch a frigate bird perform his courtship ritual. (I

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worried when they gave him a steak knife.)

The flora and fauna group lugged around cameras
with lenses the size of cannons. In their backpacks, they
carried coffee-table volumes devoted to flowers and
trees.
The fishermen had hooks sticking in their hats and
compared lures like little boys with frogs in their
pockets.
The brochure had made promises to all three
groups. The wildlifers had been promised a plethora of
animals: whale, sea otter, and bear sightings. The
nature people were along to tramp through rain forest
and stalk the Alaska coastline. The fishermen had been
guaranteed they would catch more salmon than they
could possibly eat in a lifetime.
I have never seen people so driven to their
respective special interests in my entire life. At the mere
mention of the words “whale sighting,” the dining
room would empty and the boat would list to one side.
From morning until night, groups gathered in darkened
rooms to watch slides of sea lions mating. At breakfast,
they filled notebooks with drawings of Indian
petroglyphs, and in the lounge at night the sportsmen
listened enraptured as diaries of fishing excursions were
read.
Every minute of the day, one group or another was
being launched in zodiacs to visit a seal rookery, throw
in a line, or turn over rocks somewhere.
Have you any idea what it is like to be the only

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 Alaska

shallow person in the midst of all this? A woman who

looked through binoculars and saw only her own
eyelash? Who thought that Dolly Varden was a country-
and-western singer and that a dark-eyed junco was a
description of one of the passengers?
But the sad part about it was that no one was
seeing animals, no one was being dazzled by nature’s
paintbrush, and no one was catching fish. It was as if
we were adrift in the twilight zone in a survival
experiment.
On the morning of the third or fourth day, I went
in search of the exercise room. Following directions
from a member of the crew, I cautiously pushed open a
small door marked Exercise. There were wall-to-wall
mattresses. Iwo bare-chested crew members, awakened
from a sound sleep, snapped, “Whatya want?” I silently
closed the door.
That episode brought the Ensign Pulver in me to
life. I said to my husband, “Do you know what I am
going to do? I’m going to march right into the captain’s
quarters and push this brochure up his nose and say,
‘Listen up, mister...”
“You’re not going to do that,” said my husband
gently. “Besides, if you have a complaint, get in line
behind Mrs. Syckle, who hasn’t stopped screaming ‘I
want to see bear!’ ever since she boarded this ship.
There’s a mutiny underfoot to get rid of the fishing
guide, and Joan had the captain backed against a fire
extinguisher this morning. All I heard was ‘No, you

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 Erma Bombeck

don’t understand. I spent all of my alimony on this

trip!’ These are not happy campers.”
One day when I was in my bunk reading, I heard
bells . . . five of them. My reaction surprised even me. I
felt relief and said to myself, “Thank God, we’re
sinking.” Grabbing my life jacket, I opened the door to
see the first officer tearing by. At that moment, the
safety doors just outside our room banged shut with an
echo of finality, preventing him from passage. He
turned directions to race for another exit.
“Are we evacuating ship?” I yelled after him.
“T hope not,” he shouted back.
Disappointed, I fell back into bed. It was that kind
of a day.
An announcement was made later that someone
had been smoking in the exercise room (how’s that for
irony?) and set off the smoke alarm that triggered the
bells to abandon ship. It was my last hope of getting off
alive.
It soon became evident that other than the
breathtaking views that surrounded us, the riches of
Alaska were making themselves invisible to us. At the
Iliasi Pass, we were promised a peek at fresh lava flows
. . if the weather was clear. It wasn’t. We were teased
with a chance to buy Tlingit art at a museum in
Klawock. It was closed. We were to tour Cordova for a
view of the Million Dollar Bridge. Two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars of it had been carried away by
moving glaciers. By the hour, the fishermen became

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 Alaska

more surly and the nature people more moody. The

flora and fauna people began to drink.
Every morning when we met for briefings, it was
like ninety siblings who all should have been an only
child. On about the twelfth day, the leader announced,
“We'll drop off the fishermen at 1430. At 1600 we’ll
combine the other two groups to tour a totem park and
a fish hatchery. There will also be a performance of
traditional dancing.”
‘That was agreeable to the nature people, but the
wildlife people became quite ugly. They were promised
a film on the Kittiwake Rookeries, which seemed to
settle them down. However, when the fishermen were
picked up at 1930 and still had not caught fish, the
resource person for fishing was fired on the spot. These
people played hardball.
“Where is he?” I asked my husband.
Gone:s
“But we’re out on open seas in the middle of
nowhere.” I could only assume he was set adrift on a
floating iceberg because we never saw him again.
I hung out with all three groups. I sat in a zodiac in
a cold rain for three hours and watched a brown spot
on shore that half of the group said was a black bear.
The other half said it was a tree stump. When it didn’t
move for three hours, I changed my vote to the tree
stump theory.
I found the bird people to be quite extraordinary.
Some of them kept track of the number of birds they

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 Erma Bombeck

spotted. I calculate I saw more in an hour from the

fantail of the ship following the garbage than they did in
two weeks. One day one of them was quite excited
about a dark bird with a seven-foot wingspan. It turned
out to be a mosquito.
I guess my favorite group would have to be the
fishermen. You have to admire these people who are
willing to go the distance for their sport. They’d sit
around the table and spin stories of how they could
taste the salmon they were going to catch in the months
to come. My only experience with fishermen had been
on the early Saturday morning television shows. There
was always some guy named Bubba standing up in the
boat with not another single boat around him. He had a
friend named Roy who talked constantly and would say
things like, “I never kissed a fish with bad breath, did
you, Bubba?” And they’d laugh. Every time their lines
hit the water, they got a strike. Every time.
It wasn’t like that for the fishermen in Alaska.
They would sit in the boat for hours at a time. One day
one of the men got a hook caught in his lip. I would
have been air-evac’ed under heavy sedation to the
Mayo Clinic for a week. Not him. He just reached up
and said to his wife, “Give me a hand with this, Bev.”
One morning as my husband pulled on his fishing
boots he said, “What are you going to do at Cordova?”
“I think ’'m going with the A group and watch
glaciers calve (I have no idea what that is) from the
Million Dollar Bridge. On the other hand, the B group

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 Alaska

is going to tour a salmon sonar counter station.”

“Why don’t you come with the C group? We’re
going trout fishing and maybe have a bear sighting at
Clear Creek.”
“Someone said the A group is hiking McKiley
Lake Trail and will meet both B and C on the bridge,”
I said. “Besides, the B group is really going to get ticked
off if the C group sights a bear and they don’t.”
“The C group didn’t complain when the A group
dragged everyone to their stupid rain forest with the B
group,” he growled.
“The A group really gets on your nerves,” IJ said.
“You’re the A group,” he said.
I was losing it.
All of this sounds grim, but somehow I have a
strange feeling that in terms of an expedition, this cruise
was a roaring success. People on these trips expect to
suffer. It’s part of the adventure. Part of the seduction.
Could you come back from planting a flag on the
summit of Mount Everest without frostbite? Could you
find the mouth of the Nile without getting malaria?
Could you return home from a fishing expedition to
Alaska with salmon that didn’t cost $516.12 a pound?
On the last day, as we were on our way to Prince
Rupert, both of us were once again in our beds
nauseated beyond belief from the rolling seas. In a few
hours all of this would be a bad memory, I rolled over
and said to my husband, “Do you know what I am
going to do before we make port?”

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“What?” he asked.
“I’m going to do something on behalf of all these
poor unfortunates who. survived on this bucket for two
weeks. I am going to leave this cabin, march straight to
the captain’s deck, take his palm tree out of the pot,
and throw it overboard. Then I am going to knock on
his door and announce, ‘Captain! I have just thrown
your—’”
“You’re not going to do that,” he said tiredly.
He was right. I didn’t do that.
But there hasn’t been a day since that I don’t hate
myself for not doing it.

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 Working Vacations

Combining work and play on a vacation never

worked for me. Doctors are good at it. They go on a
cruise, swim all morning, and laze around the pool.
Around two, they attend a lecture on how to treat
“Statement Printout Anxiety” and later view a style
show on paper gowns. They dance until two A.M. and
write the whole thing off.
On a couple of occasions, I have been lured into
doing a book tour in some country where I am
promised some free time on my own. In your dreams.
You try to sell books to 3 million sheep in New Zealand
and tell me how much time you have to relax.
A few books ago, I toured Australia and New

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 Erma Bombeck

Zealand for a month. Beginning at Perth, I worked my

way across Australia’s 2,966,200 square miles.
Do you think I saw Mel Gibson? Colleen
McCullough? Or Crocodile Dundee throwing a few
shrimp on the barbie? Get real.
I saw one koala bear with runny eyes, bubbling
sulfa at Rotorua, a staged Maori dance at the hotel, a
geothermal plant, and two kangaroos from the car. Oh
yes, I bumped into Jim Nabors and Jackie Collins on a
talk show.
It was the same in London. I heard people talk of a
place where you could see the crown jewels of Britain. I
heard there was a beautiful river Thames that ran
through the city and that the queen lived in a palace
with guards at the gate.
I didn’t so much as get to the hat factory where
they made all those hats that Princess Di and Fergie
wear to deliver their babies in. Where was I? I was
inside a building called the BBC. Every morning I
would sit in a little room by myself with a pair of
headphones. When a little red light went on, I would
say, “Good morning, Ireland” or “Good morning,
Wales” and I would talk about my book. For that, I
shaved my legs.
It is rare when your work takes you to a place you
really want to go. It is doubly rare when your reason for
being there opens doors to you that you would never
get through if you were on holiday.
Such was the case with Russia.

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 Russia

When my husband and I made our first trip to

Russia in 1977, the journey had all the giddiness of
being extradited to a Georgia penal institution. We were
guarded closely, counted every time we went to the
bathroom, and sequestered by Intourist services. God
forbid we would see or talk with a Soviet citizen.
From the time our tour group left the ship in
Leningrad, where we boarded the Red Arrow train to
Moscow, we were never left alone. If Russians were
interested in us, they didn’t show it: Their eyes focused
on the ground in front of them. We were mothered
through Red Square, folkloric performances, and state
shopping stores. We were fed in private dining rooms. It

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 Erma Bombeck

was reminiscent of being in a kindergarten class and

holding hands in a single file when you visited the
airport.
Since our time in Moscow was short, three couples
were assigned to a dayroom at an Intourist hotel to
“freshen up.” As my husband and I sat on a bed in the
awkward silence of being with four other people we
didn’t know, the young woman from Canada broke the
silence with, “Anyone for a nooner?” I could visualize a
poor KGB agent in a basement somewhere rummaging
through English dictionaries trying to figure out what a
“nooner” was.
Visiting this beige, bland, unleavened strip of
Europe was akin to chewing on a stalk of celery—no
enjoyment, but you could at least say you ate. I left it
with a burning curiosity about the people who lived in
those stark, colorless high-rises. Who were these
emotionless faces we saw from the windows of touring
buses that never slowed down? Maybe if I had been
able to look into just one pair of eyes, I could have
gotten a handle on what they were all about.
It was to be ten years before we returned to Russia.
We were on a cruise and made port in a small town
called Nakhodka, the eastern terminus of the Trans-
Siberian Railway. Word of glasnost and perestroika had
reached the cruise ships. The rumor had filtered down
to Nakhodka . . . but just barely.
I had an aunt whom we once called to tell her we
were going to drop by for a visit for a few hours. With

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 Russia

fifteen hours’ notice, my aunt wallpapered the entire

house, painted the lawn’ furniture, landscaped the front
and back yards, fixed the toilet, hung new draperies,
plastered the kitchen, Jaid new carpet throughout, had
her harr*cut; and bought a new grill to cook out.
Nakhodka people did the same thing. rs
An invasion of tourists from an American cruise
ship was not a thing that happened every day in this
little town and they were going to make it memorable.
They put together a luncheon where the tables groaned
with food. A small orchestra played at eighty-six
decibels. Hostesses smiled and offered you drinks. They
thought of everything but chairs and silverware.
For entertainment, they staged a gymnastic
exhibition in the school gym. As we filed in, we nearly
passed out from the paint fumes, but we slid onto the
bright blue benches to watch Russian children perform
with the style and grace for which they are noted. When
they finished, my husband leaned over and said, “We
can go now.” I whispered back, “You can go. My shoes
are stuck to the floor.” Looking around, I realized they
weren’t the only things embedded in the paint. Those
who couldn’t get a seat carried away paint on their
slacks and sweaters from brushing against the
doorways.
All of it was awkward—like two countries on a
blind date. But then an extraordinary thing happened
as it can only when people are left to their own devices.
Our buses had pulled up to the Nakhodka Museum, a

ZL}
 Erma Bombeck

dreary collection of maritime memorabilia and

restrooms that didn’t work. As the Americans sat on the
steps, a few took yet another picture of yet another
Lenin statue that dominated the square. Mostly, we
were killing time. From a distance came a parade of the
town’s citizens. Mothers in their best dresses pushed
babies in strollers. Men appeared in suits and ties, and
from somewhere a group of musicians started to play
music on the museum steps. The townspeople made a
circle and began to dance for us. The Americans made
the circle even larger. We couldn’t begin to
communicate with one another, but somehow there was
a strong feeling that if we both reached out, we would
remember this day for a long time.
I did.
The following year I was invited to Russia along
with eight other American women to have a dialogue
with members of the Soviet Women’s Committee. It
was a working visit sparked by Ellen Levine, editor of
Woman’s Day magazine, and an organization called
Peace Links created by Betty Bumpers of Arkansas. We
hoped the meeting would result in an exchange of
problems, followed by an exchange of solutions.
As I sat at the long table, tilted on the side of the
Russians by sheer numbers, I at last had a chance to
look into the eyes of these people. Maybe if we cried
about the same things and laughed about the same
things there was hope for the world.
Since I was introduced as a humorist, I began my

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 Russia

remarks by telling them that the major problem of

American women was that for every pair of socks put
into the washer, only one sock came back. We figured it
went to live with Jesus.
It wasn’t the first time I had told a joke and died. It
was, however, the first time I felt they were going to
outline my body in chalk. How could Russian women
possibly relate to washing machine stories when no one
owned one?
Moving right along, I told them the second major
problem in America was men who sat around and
watched one hundred and eighty-seven football games a
weekend. At this point, the entire Russian delegation
snapped to life and the chairman interrupted, “Mrs.
Bombeck, you have just touched upon a global
problem. What do you do in America about husbands
who watch too much TV?”
I told her I had mine declared legally dead and his
estate probated.
The laughter came. It was a Laughnost
breakthrough. From there on in, we became a good-
ole-girls network trying to pinpoint our concerns and
how we could deal effectively with them.
One woman told us how Russian women were
given the incentive of 200 rubles ($336 in U.S.
currency) for giving birth to triplets. She added dryly,
“You don’t see anyone racing for the door, do you?”
Another one complained about the reticence of the
Russians to talk about sex. “There is no sex education

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 Erma Bombeck

taught in schools. My only instruction was from my

mother who said, ‘You’ll get sick of the whole business
soon enough.’” (The unmarried American delegate
on my left mumbled, “Don’t I wish.” The translator
broke up.)
At one point, one of the women, who held a
doctorate in education, excused herself from the table.
When we asked where she was going, we were told her
grandchild was home ill and she wanted to check on
him. They had caring grandmothers . . . even in the
Evil Empire. Imagine that.
As I sat there day after day wearing headphones,
listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words
relevant, I wondered if we could establish a meaningful
rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance
in dark glasses on TV ... mever had a garage sale...
never played bingo in the church basement.
I remembered the long lines of people I had seen
on Gorky Street on my way to the offices of the
committee. I recall thinking if I was standing in the
early morning frost for hours, there had better be a pair
of Phantom of the Opera tickets at the end of it or a ride
on Magic Mountain.
Was it possible that out of our uncommon lives we
shared common problems? We didn’t have a choice. If
we really loved our children, then we had to start
reaching out to one another.
When you’ve been adversaries for so long, it’s hard
to show your warts. Each country had them. It was only

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a matter of who was going to show theirs first. It was a

slow process. We admitted American women were not
in our Constitution. Russian women were in their
constitution. They admitted the day care centers that
were supposed to be years ahead of ours had a lot of
problems. We admitted to a high divorce rate. They
allowed there was a serious drinking problem among
Soviet men. They had guilt. We had guilt. We would
like to get rid of toys that depicted Russians as villains.
They expressed shock because they had never had
warlike toys to begin with.
Slowly, almost shyly, they began to ask about our
system, especially about how we provided so much
counseling to our people. We talked to them about
“volunteerism.” The word didn’t even translate. The
closest we came was “compassion.” We told them
helping one another was what Americans did best.
They pointed out they heard we put our elderly
parents into homes and ignored them. They didn’t do
that. We pointed out they didn’t mainstream their
disabled. They burst with pride that changes were
abounding in the Soviet Union. I asked them how
many Jews were represented on their Women’s Soviet
Committee and there was a long silence. “The weaker
our men get, the stronger we become,” they said.
We pointed out their country, like ours, is run primarily
by men.
The glaring difference between the present
Moscow and the one of a few years ago was the

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freedom with which we moved through the city. We

availed ourselves of the circus, the Bolshoi Ballet, and
the daily search for food.
You can only have so many hot dogs for breakfast
and then you go into junk food shock. We had to have
real food. Through conscientious whining, we found
out that a cooperative restaurant (one that is privately
owned) in Moscow served Sara Lee cheesecake. On a
scale of one to ten in euphoria, it was just under an
arms agreement. We all piled into taxicabs and made
our way to the restaurant.
OK, so the bread was bad, the salad was bad, the
fish was bad, but we knew there was a big finish. They
were out of cheesecake.
Many times before travelers go to a country, they
pack too much baggage—not necessarily clothes, but
impressions of what the people are going to be like and
how they will fit the stereotype fashioned for them. In
my mind, I visualized Russian women with skinny legs,
big boobs, and no waistline draped in the same print
dress. In fact, there was a commercial shown in
America depicting industrial-strength Soviet women
that only reinforced my perception. It was a fashion
show in which every Russian woman had the same
floral shift, and the only way you knew the outfit was
different was that she carried a beachball for “svimvear”
or a flashlight for “evening vear.”
I was wrong. Russian women may not be as trendy
as American women, but they care about what they

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look like as much as other women throughout the

world. They are limited only by budget and availability
of merchandise. They have waistlines and trim ankles,
and they wear makeup effectively. It was a surprise for
me to hear they are “into” spas and have been for years.
Personally, I am a spa freak. Show me a place
where you touch your ear to your knee one hundred
forty-five times an hour, balance your body in the air on
your shoulders and squeeze your buttocks, sit naked in
a Jacuzzi, eat oat breath mints and drink herbal tea, and
I will pay $1,500 a week to go there.
I arrive with suitcases filled with cute little
coordinated outfits that I change six times a day. I don’t
read a newspaper or watch TV. My focus is my body
and whether or not I’m a summer, fall, autumn, or
spring “color.” I go early to the gym and get my spot all
staked out. (An evil woman once snapped at me, “If I
had known it was so territorial, I'd have wet on my
mat!”) I spend all my evenings writing. down recipes
which I will never use, popping water pills, and
committing my cholesterol number to memory.
Spas'in America are usually limited to women who
don’t need them, but who want to be pampered and
told they don’t need them. They just like the elegance
of sitting around listening to Japanese music piped into
their pillows, rose petals on their tofu, and fifty-pound
terry cloth robes.
With this picture in mind, I stood before a red
brick Russian bath that could have been the oldest

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school building in New York City. It made a

condemned Y look like La Costa. There were four of us
who at this point concurred that coming here was one
of the bravest things we had ever done. We didn’t know
a single word of Russian between us, had no idea how
we were going to bluff our way through this day once
we left the cab. At best, we could spend a luxurious
afternoon. At worst, we could set Russian relations
back two hundred years.
We checked our coats and waited. Several minutes
had passed when a woman summoned us to follow her
to a large room with little cubicles. She then went
through a pantomime of taking off her clothes over her
head. No one spoke as we looked at one another. She did
it again and disappeared. Finally, one of our delegates
said, “I think she wants us to take our clothes off.”
“Mary-Lou,” I said, “if you are wrong, this is going
to be the longest day of our lives.”
Once we were in the buff, we were led to a large
room and abandoned. Milling around us were thirty or
more buck-naked Soviet women wearing wool ski caps.
It was enough to take the sight out of a good eye. They
looked us over and instinctively knew we were
Americans and decided to take us under their wings.
We didn’t have ski caps to protect our heads from
the heat of the sauna, so they wrapped towels around
our skulls. We would have followed them anywhere.
When they scrubbed their feet, we scrubbed our feet.
When they grabbed eucalyptus branches to flog

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themselves in the steam bath, so did we. When they sat

in the sauna and dehydrated, we clung to them the way
a nylon slip sticks to pantyhose. When they fell into the
cold, green pool, we followed. Later, we all agreed that
summit meetings betwéén world leaders should be
conducted in the nude—to keep everything in
perspective. It’s a great equalizer.
Their facials are-in Baskin-Robbins flavors. I chose
the strawberry because one of the attendants showed
me a picture of Linda Evans and then pointed to the
strawberry mix. Gorbachev should have her optimism.
When a magazine editor asked in amazement why
we went to a Russian bath and what I discovered about
Soviet women there, I said, “It reaffirmed what I have
always known .-. . all women are not created equal.”
Or were we? Once you have looked into the eyes of
people in a foreign country, you realize you all want the
same thing: food on your table, love in your marriage,
healthy children, laughter, freedom to be. The religion,
the ideology, and the government may be different, but
the dreams are all the same.
We were nearing our last hours in Moscow. I went
to my hotel room to pack. It was an enormous room, a
two-room suite, actually, that was so... Russian. The
ceilings were high and ornate; there was bric-a-brac
everywhere. Antique lamps were topped by shades with
fringe. Hardwood floors gleamed. A large piano
dominated the room. (It had no insides.) I picked up
the last of the bottled water I had brought from New

Z19
 Erma Bombeck

York (I couldn’t find any in Russia) and went to the

window before slugging it down. The room overlooked
the Kremlin.
I folded the used towels in the bathroom, emptied
the ashtrays bulging with candy wrappers (I had
brought candy to give to the children, but I needed it
worse than they did), and closed the giant doors of the
ornate armoire. Pausing at the door before leaving, I
walked back into the room and poised myself over one
of the lamps before speaking into it. “Forget the extra
towels I ordered. I’m leaving today. I had a nice time.”
I don’t know if the room was bugged or not, but if
we love children, someone has to give.

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 A Jack Nicholson
Wheat Toast Day

In a film called Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson

has a classic scene in a diner. When he orders two
pieces of wheat toast, he is told it isn’t on the menu and
they cannot possibly make an exception.
He says to the waitress, “Let me make it easy for
you. I'll have the chicken salad sandwich on wheat
bread. Hold the mayonnaise, hold the lettuce and the
chicken salad, and toast the bread.”
Eating on a vacation is often a challenge. Shortages,
customs, unrecognizable spices, ethnic favorites, lack of

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health standards. All are a part of the foraging process.

Sometimes it’s a real cerebral experience.
While in Jerusalem, I called room service on a
Friday night to order something light for dinner.
“T’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of
matzo ball soup,” I said.
The voice of room service said, “I cannot do that.
This is Shabbat.” (Shabbat is the Jewish sabbath
observance from sundown on Friday to sundown on
Saturday.)
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“That means we observe kosher dietary laws. We
cannot serve a dairy product with the soup and the
soup would have to be served separately. They cannot
be delivered on the same tray, nor can they be in the
room at the same time. Also, we do not do manual
labor on Shabbat and cannot operate the toaster.”
“I see,” I said. “Then could you bring a bowl of
soup to my room? Then deliver me a plain cheese
sandwich on whole wheat bread and leave it in the
hallway. When I am finished with the soup, I will put
the bowl in the hallway and bring in the sandwich.” It
was perfectly acceptable and no laws were broken.
There is always a way.

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 Montserrat

The kids were oohing and aahing over the

swimming pool tucked underneath the villa. My
husband was in a state of excitement at being able to
bring in Dan Rather on the large TV set in the living
room. Other family members and friends were
exploring the fantastic view from the large porch that
overlooked the Caribbean.
I was in the kitchen slumped in a chair wondering
how I was going to feed ten people with one box of
powdered milk, one jar of jelly, three frozen chicken
fillets, one small jar of instant coffee, and a bottle of
Scotch.

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When we leased the villa, we were assured the staff

would stock provisions for the first day until we got our
bearings. The agreement also listed a caretaker in
residence and maid service four days a week.
The caretaker was a young islander who called
himself Soul Man. He was born in Montserrat and had
the deal of his life. He had his own digs, used the big
house when no one was there, and had use of a car. All
he had to do for all of this was to smile and cut the
grass every two weeks.
“T have to make a trip into town for groceries,” I
told Soul Man. “I cannot possibly feed ten people with
this. Do you suppose you could give me a hand?”
Bhetsmile Meverntieft shismhandsonire sface.-
“OQoooooh, bad time to go to the store. It’s the day after
Christmas.”
“I know that, but tomorrow is Sunday and we’re
going to be in big trouble by then.”
Soul Man drove me to a large warehouse of sorts
where cases of beer and soft drinks were stacked to the
ceiling. At one end were a few sparsely stocked shelves.
All the milk was powdered. There were no fresh
vegetables or fruits and only a few loaves of bread.
“How about meats?” I asked.
He smiled and pointed to a chest freezer. I opened
it and stared in. It was barren with the exception of five
inches of frost and three naked chickens that had been
dressed and tossed in . . . no bags, no wrappings, no
nothing. Their positions were unnatural. I pulled them

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out and headed to the checkout with them in my cart.

The moment the cashier saw the chickens she
began to scream at me. “What is she saying?” I asked
Soul Man.
“She says those are her chickens. She has been
saving them until she gets off work. They are not for
sale.”
For the first day or so, we ate like we were a lost
platoon on maneuvers. I apologized and said come
Monday I would go to a real store.
On Monday, when I approached Soul Man, he
said, “Ooooooh, bad time to go to store on Monday.
It’s the day of the beauty pageant in Montserrat.
Everything closed.”
“Maybe when Carla the maid comes in she will
know of a store that is open,” I said.
“Carla will not come in today. I told you, it’s the
day of the beauty pageant.”
“Ts she in it?” I asked.
He thought I was joking and smiled.
During the next day or so we visited several
grocery stores, each one more depressing than the one
before. We scoured the phone book and saw a full-page
ad for a meat market. When we got there, it was the
size of an airline restroom and had nothing. We ate a lot
of bread and applesauce and cookies.
But it was the instant coffee that drove us crazy. All
of us are “real coffee” drinkers. We searched the house
from top to bottom looking for some kind of a pot to

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brew coffee in. No success. On our next trip to town,

we vowed to get a coffeepot for “real coffee.”
On the fourth day, one of our guests unearthed a
seven-pound ham. I figured that would give us a
dinner, plus sandwiches for a day or so. By the time the
fat cooked down, we were lucky to have enough to
flavor green beans. If we had been able to get green
beans.
Carla didn’t come on the next working day
because it was Jump-Up Festival in Montserrat. I had
no idea what that was, but if they served snow cones on
the street or even a hot dog, it was worth cleaning my
own house and doing my own laundry. We went to
Jump-Up Festival but never found a street vendor.
When we asked strangers where they shopped, they
were rather vague and guarded about where they got
their food. One woman advised I should go to the open
market if I wanted fresh fruits and vegetables. “But go
early,” she warned.
I barely slept just thinking about an outdoor
market. I don’t even like salads. Catsup every week or
so is the only vegetable I eat with any regularity. But the
idea of not seeing a tomato or a piece of lettuce for a
week just seemed unnatural.
In the small, dark hours of the morning, my
husband and I headed to market with our large baskets
in tow. We joined the small group of people milling
around. At one counter, a salesperson stood guard over
thirty-seven little string beans. I counted them.

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“T’ll take all the string beans you have,” I said,

opening my purse.
She looked at me closely like she was interviewing
a surrogate mother. “If I sell you the string beans, you
have to take the tomato.”
The tomato was bruised beyond description. “I
don’t want the tomato,” I said.
“Then you don’t get the string beans.” She sniffed
and went on to the next customer. I ran behind her
pleading my case. I couldn’t believe it. I was groveling
for thirty-seven lousy beans for ten people!
I never worked so hard for food in my life. I got
four potatoes at one stand, three tomatoes at another,
two heads of romaine lettuce, and a bunch of green
bananas that are still on the kitchen countertop in
Montserrat ripening to this day.
“Where do you buy meat?” I kept asking. Finally,
one man motioned to the alley behind the market. I
walked up and down until I found a door with a freezer
inside.
“Hamburger?” I asked.
The man smiled and gave me a box full of frozen
patties. I had the feeling they were any kind of meat
you wanted them to be.
A couple of our guests were in charge of tracking
down a coffeepot, which was like telling Columbus,
“Go find a new world.” An owner of one of the stores
finally said, “Look, I’ve got an electric coffeepot I never
use. I’ll sell it to you for $40.”

Pea |
 Erma Bombeck

There was a reason why he never used it. The

current in Montserrat was all wrong for it and it took
hours for the water to filter through the coffee. One of
us would have to set the alarm for two A.M. to start the
coffee so it would be there for breakfast.
After a while, it was amazing how the Swiss Family
Wilderness actually survived. We got pretty creative. At
lunch one day we had potato salad, canned tuna salad,
and canned shrimp salad. If anyone was allergic to
mayonnaise, he’d have starved to death. Another time
we planned a picnic around beef jerky and oatmeal
cookies. It was never “What did you do today?” It was,
“What did you find to eat today?”
Through conscientious dedication, we found a
Sara Lee outlet, an ice cream connection, and a bakery.
The big news is we found a turkey for New Year’s. All
of us wrote cards home sharing that find.
One morning of the second week, a woman
appeared at the villa and started to dust the dining
room. It was the elusive Carla, a Montserrat native
species we thought was extinct. She explained she
missed two days ago because of New Year’s. We said we
understood. We asked her if there was one great grocery
store we hadn’t found yet and she said, “No.” Then she
added, “I won’t be in on Friday. It’s my birthday.”
We tried to rationalize the shortage of food on
Montserrat. There was food on Antigua, Guadeloupe,
and other islands around it. Maybe eating was
something that never got important to them. I

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remember picking up a large circle of white enclosed in

cellophane and asking the grocery clerk what it was.
She said, “It’s icing for the cake. After you have baked a
cake, you just drop it on.” I never figured them for the
Stepford Wives . . . especially Carla. Maybe we were
trying to re-create the home we had just left. Most
travelers are like that when it comes to their stomachs.
It’s interesting what you think about when you
mention the name of a place you’ve visited. I barely
remember the beaches, the weather, or the history of
Montserrat. I think about ten people who for one
shining moment thought they had come to Camelot
and ended up with beef jerky and oatmeal cookies.
The night before we left the island retreat, my
husband said, “Don’t forget to clean out the
refrigerator.” What a kidder. It had been cleaned out
since the day we arrived.
“How early do we leave in the morning?” I asked.
“The plane takes off at seven-thirty A.M.,” he
answered.
I jumped up. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? The
coffee will never get done.”

229
 Great Barrier Reef

We have never been your basic beach family.

We don’t know what to do with ourselves.
There is a picture of us taken in Hawaii several
years ago on our visit to the island of Kauai. While
other fun-seekers around us were stretched out
comatose on towels, their basted bodies toasted brown
by the sun, our family was a study in motion. The dog
was hyper from chasing a Frisbee. Our sons were
playing volleyball. Our daughter was building the
Trump Tower in the sand. My husband was swathed in
towels balancing our checkbook. I was hooking a rug.
We have slides of us doing crossword puzzles on

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 - Great Barrier Reef

the beach in Tahiti, buying dresses from vendors in

Cabo San Lucas, and using metal detectors in search of
loose change in Fiji. Other than the fact that we are all
keeping busy, there is another common thread running
through the pictures. I am wearing the same bathing suit.
It is a no-nonsense, one-piece, blue and white
polka dot with industrial strength straps, a generous
drape over the stomach, and enough rubber in the bra
to support an eighteen-wheeler.
If I weren’t such a phony, I’d probably admit that’s
the real reason I don’t “do beaches.” They’re infested
with women from the current Sports Illustrated
swimwear edition. I have cooked bigger turkeys than
most of them.
The idea of actually going into the water came
about on a Caribbean cruise when one of the ports was
St. Thomas. My husband wanted me to take a short
course in scuba diving, but when I heard you had to do
a little math I told him if I wanted to use my brain on
vacation, I’d stay in my cabin and watch “Jeopardy.”
Instead, I took a bus to a beach where a young kid spit
into a mask, placed it over my face, and told me to float
and I would probably see Lloyd Bridges. I fell in love
with snorkeling. I wasn’t good at it, but I loved it. It
was a world I had never seen before.
When we made plans to take the family to the
Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, I even
went so far as to try to replace my fifteen-year-old
swimsuit.

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 Erma Bombeck

I brushed by the racks of bikinis that looked like

snack crackers and wondered who designed these
things. Swimsuit manufacturers were out to lunch. Did
they honestly believe that all women are endowed with
the same equipment? Couldn’t they figure out that
when a stomach is covered with gold lamé it looks like
the Capitol dome? Or that many women have erosion
on their bodies that looks like a relief map of
California’s freeways?
My hand brushed by a little one-piece black suit
that looked promising. In the fitting room, it slipped
over my body. The neck was high enough, but the legs
of the suit went all the way up to my armpits. I figured
no one at the Great Barrier Reef had seen my blue and
white polka dot number.
Our destination was Heron Island, one of two
island resorts that is actually on the reef. It formerly
housed a turtle soup factory, but that didn’t work out,
and in 1932, someone figured out it had tourist
potential.
At Gladstone, Australia, a woman quickly rushed
us onto the tarmac into a waiting helicopter for the trip.
As an afterthought, she tossed in a couple of packets
and said, “By the way, these are your parachute packs.
Please don’t inflate them until after you leave the
plane.” I had no intention of leaving the plane.
An hour later, we were at one of the most beautiful
islands I had ever set eyes on. It was our kind of beach.
No one, but no one, was sitting idly in the sun.

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 Great Barrier Reef

Everyone was busy. Children and adults wearing tennis

shoes were scouring the shallow reefs with glass-bottom
buckets looking for sea life. Snorkelers dotted the water,
and large rubber boats carried scores of divers to blue
waters rich with sea life.
I quickly changed into my suit, spit on my mask,
put it over my face, and floated out to sea. Within
minutes, my older son tapped me on the shoulder and
as I lifted my face out of the water, I saw him waving
two feet of fat snake in front of my eyes. “It’s a sea
slug,” he yelled. I wanted to hurt him. My husband
said, “Don’t scare your mother like that.” I was a little
more direct. “You-are-out-of-the-will!” I shouted.
On an excursion in the glass-bottom boat I saw
things that I had never seen in the gentle coves of St.
Thomas. These fish had large mouths and jagged teeth.
There were slimy eels and humongous shadows cast by
manta rays. This was not good.
With each day my enthusiasm for exploring the
deep became less and less. It was a case of knowing too
much. Then one afternoon, we were poking around the
beach when my husband said, “I think I'll snorkel a bit
before lunch.” He was out there about an hour or so
when I said to the kids, “Look, your father is only in
four feet of water muddling around. He’ll be all right.
Let’s have lunch.”
Halfway through the meal, their father joined us,
visibly shaken. He had been snorkeling when a large
shark began to encircle him. The waiter standing

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nearby smiled and said, “This isn’t Sea World, you

know. It’s the South Pacific.”
He was absolutely right. What did we know about.
what lurked down there? We didn’t know which coral to
touch or which fish to pet. All we knew was Jacques
Cousteau sitting around a table eating lobster and
talking French.
The next day, we were at the beach early.
The kids were playing cards. My husband was
tallying up our credit card expenses. I was
needlepointing a pillow top of John Wayne.

234
 Time to Go Home

No one has to tell you on a vacation when it is time

to go home.
It’s nothing obvious like ripping out your last
traveler’s check or running out of malaria pills.
It can be as simple as standing in a line waiting for
a bullet train in Japan, and suddenly you are being
shoved aside and you yell, “Those pushy French again!
This isn’t the Maginot Line you’re defending, sweetie,
it’s only a seat on a commuter train!”
You’re testy and you know it.
You are sick of being served sheep’s eyeballs and
having some idiot say, “Bloomingdale’s sells this as a
delicacy in their Christmas catalog.” If someone tells

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 Erma Bombeck

you an icon is over 2 million years old and is only steps

from the bus, you yawn and say, “Describe it to me.”
Your homing instincts kick in. A carnival could fill the
streets outside your hotel window and you opt to stay in
your room and watch CNN.
You’re bored with your wardrobe and your hair.
You’re exhausted from packing and rearranging all
those stupid souvenirs you couldn’t live without, and
you’re fed up to here with people quoting battles and
dates.
My husband can always tell when I’m on Vacation
Overload. I turn into Leona Helmsley.
You know the ads that used to appear in the airline
magazines, where the headline reads SPOTLESS! BUT
NOT TO LEONA HELMSLEY. CAN YOU SEE WHY?
I know why! There are four hand towels and two
bath towels hung on the bar in my bathroom and there
should be four bath towels to go with the four hand
towels. Incompetent sows.
I don’t know why I take everything out on my
surroundings, but I do. If my soap is the size of a credit
card, I cry. If my bedspread weighs a hundred and
thirty-seven pounds and I have to remove it, I have a
temper tantrum, and if the paper strip across the toilet
seat is broken, I fall apart.
My hotel room is either too big or too small. There
is no pleasing me on the last days of a vacation. It’s
someone’s law—the shorter your stay, the more
elaborate your room.

236
 Time to Go Home

In Tokyo, we checked into a suite that had a

boardroom table the size of my entire house, a bar, a
concert grand piano, and five bathrooms. The ceiling
over one of the tubs was mirrored.
“It figures,” I groused. “We’re staying here one
night. Why couldn’t we have had these accommodations
in Adelaide, Australia, when we were jammed in a
broom closet for a week and had to turn off the TV set
with our toes? Hurry up and unpack so I can sit in a
tub, look at the ceiling, and watch my cellulite float.”
In Istanbul, I remember pausing just outside the
room we had been assigned. I noted a small gold plate
on the door that read Julio Iglesias Room. I kicked
open the door. There were twin beds six inches off the
floor, draped in tired royal blue satin ruffled spreads.
The blue satin curtains sagged like a dirty diaper and
had a few pins missing. The carpet was threadbare, the
refrigerator door was ajar, and the radiator was a
monument to ugly. “I don’t care if Julio Iglesias comes
with the bed,” I snapped, “I’m leaving.”
Usually, I am not like this. Accommodations are a
part of the adventure. We have stayed in the best and
the worst of them. We have been guests in Paradise
where there is a hair dryer on the wall, a terrycloth robe
on a hook, heated towel racks, toilet paper that is
folded over into points, and a picture over the sofa of
an eyeball in shades of green with a brass plate that
reads Phoebe in Love.
We have also visited Flop City with a bottle opener

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 Erma Bombeck

on the door, a room key that dangles from a piece of

wood the size of a tree trunk, a nude woman fashioned
into a lamp with the switch in her navel, and nothing on
the wall but the room rates.
During the last days of a vacation I form pictures of
my house in my mind. For no apparent reason I will be
looking at a prehistoric pot somewhere and I will say to
my husband, “Did you turn off the coffeepot when we
left?”
This makes him as anxious to get home as I am.
You can always tell when vacationers are going or
coming. Travelers who are at the beginning of a trip
laugh and tell jokes. Their clothes match. They see a
line and they go to the end of it.
Those returning are impatient. Every plane they
board is like the last one out of Baghdad and they are
going to be on it.
Something else happens to me that I cannot
explain. I become as American as the Fourth of July. I
can’t wait to see the Energizer rabbit march across the
TV screen or Mayor Dinkins’s picture welcoming me to
New York City. I want to hear cabdrivers yell, “Get out
of my face!” I want to eat hamburgers so fat I can barely
fit them in my mouth. I want to hear English and see
signs I can read and spend “real” money. I want Dan
Rather to tell me how the world has fared in my
absence, I want to smell clean clothes, drink tap water,
and sleep in my own bed.
But reentering the world you have left for two or

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 Time to Go Home

three weeks is not an easy thing. One must pay a price

for exploring new cultures. You cannot just get on a
plane, arrive home, and pick up life where you left it.
You first have to go through a rite of passage, a ritual as
old as man himself. It is called jet lag.

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 Jet Lag

Jet lag is a temporary disruption of the body’s

normal biological rhythms after high-speed air travel
through several time zones.
That’s a classy way of saying your body will never
be the same again. You will sleep when everyone else is
awake, camp outside supermarkets at three A.M. waiting
for them to open, nod off during a root canal, and
possibly damage your biological clock and give birth at
the age of fifty-three. You could die from jet lag.
There have been a couple of feeble attempts to
deal with the malady. A drug called Melatonin has been
used effectively on sheep, but how many sheep do you
know who are frequent flyers?

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 Jet Lag

A few years ago when scientists began to take the

problem seriously, they even did some research and
discovered that eating and drinking light and exercising
helped make the transition from time zone to time zone
easier. Like I’m going to sit in my seat and pretend I’m
rowing a boat or raise my knees to my chin or roll my
shoulders back and forth. Get outta here! The only
aerobic exercise anyone gets on a plane is disengaging
oneself from the jaws of the folding door of the
restroom which threatens to digest you.
My husband has an interesting theory. He figures if
he refuses to change his watch he can play around with
the difference and eventually catch up an hour at a
time.
The real truth is a couple of years ago the kids
bought him a runner’s watch for Father’s Day. He
never could set it. It’s easier to pop out to Stonehenge
and measure shadows than it is to get the night time out
of him. Ask him the hour and prepare to grow old.
We were on the way back from Tokyo and I made
the mistake of asking him the time. He said, “Wait a
minute. I have to find my glasses.” After several
minutes of searching, he said, “Do you have a pencil
handy?” Then he proceeded to calculate, tabulate,
subtract, and divide, and by the time he came up with
the time, we were in another time zone. Finally he said,
“Why do you want to knowe”
I said, “I want to know when to sleep.”
He said, “Your body will tell you.”

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 Erma Bombeck

I must have sat there an hour before my body said,

“It’s nine P.M., Erma, and in another hour I am going
to crash.”
I said to my body, “You know, you’d be doing me
a big favor if you could just stay awake and eat a six-
course dinner and watch Jewel of the Nile. Trust me,
you'll be a better person for it.”
My body said, “Why should I believe you? That’s
what you told me the year you took me to Australia.
I’ve never been the same.”
“Give me a break,” I pleaded. “Do I ask you for
much?”
Halfway through fFewel of the Nile, my body defied
me and dozed off. Four hours later the lights of the
plane went on and the steward announced, “Breakfast.”
My body jerked to attention and said, “What are
you trying to pull, dimbulb? I just ate. Besides, you
know I sleep on Sundays.”
“It’s not Sunday, it’s Monday. Now have a hard
roll and shut up!”
My body didn’t speak to me for a long time. As we
approached Hawaii, I nudged it again and whispered,
“Time to eat breakfast.”
I heard it mumble, “We did that, remember?”
“Well, do it again.” We were at odds with one
another the entire trip home. I made my legs walk when
they were asleep, closed my eyes when they were wide
open, ate dinner in the A.M. and breakfast in the P.M.,
trying to adjust.

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 Jet Lag

In Los Angeles, as the plane emptied, it occurred

to me we looked like a transport of derelicts. There was
a steady stream of passengers with eyes that sparkled
under a rosy glaze, disheveled clothes, twisted hair that
stood on end, and enough bags under their eyes to keep
twenty porters employed for a year. They had the look
of people with no will to live.

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 Homecoming

Vacations fade fast. Their memories are

obliterated by little things. You arrive home to discover
your car has died. Neighbors inform you the power
went off while you were gone and your freezer will
smell like a fertilizer plant when you open the door.
Somehow, it escaped someone’s attention that your
garden hose was left running and floated your house to
a new zip code.
If all that doesn’t take the hats and horns out of
your trip, distribution of the souvenirs will.
Rarely does anyone appreciate what you have gone
through to get these gifts home. They have no meaning.

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 Homecoming

The primitive necklace that you bargained for in

‘Tanzania is held at arm’s length by a friend who sniffs,
“Is this another one of these things that I have to put in
the freezer first to kill bugs?”
Children are the worst. I once babied a large
Mexican hat the size of a satellite dish. It wouldn’t fit
under the seat on the plane or in the overhead bin. I
had to wear it most of the time. Our son looked at it,
said it smelled, and kicked it under his bed.
The fur drum we dragged home for one of them
from the Bahamas literally came alive when we turned
the furnace on. We saw it scaling the wall one day.
A couple of years ago when we returned from the
Orient, I spread all my souvenirs out on the dining
room table and circled it slowly for hours trying to
figure out who deserved any of it.
My husband came into the room and said, “Did
you give the silk kimono to your mother yet?”
“You know,” I said slowly, “I have to think about
that. She likes to get dressed as soon as she rolls out of
bed. It would just hang there in her closet. Besides, it’s
not her color so I’m keeping it for myself.”
“You could give her the tea set.”
“T could, but I’m not. I don’t have a nice tea set,
and besides, I heard her say once that tea upsets her
stomach.”
“So you’re going with the woodblock print?” .
“TI was until I got to thinking you would have to
have been at the factory to appreciate all the work that

245
 Erma Bombeck

goes into them. Actually, I’ve got the perfect spot for it
in the living room.”
“How about the glass necklace?”
“You really think so? I don’t think Mother has the
chest for it. I’ll keep that for myself. I’m leaning toward
the T-shirt.”
“IT thought you bought those for your aunts.”
“We never see them,” I said, “so I kept three for
myself and decided to give each of them a pair of
chopsticks.”
“Smart idea. They’re nice ones. They were
expensive.”
“On the other hand, I might have a dinner party
with a theme some night. Maybe I’ll give them a
Christmas ornament and brochure on the history of the
silkworm.”
“They'll be choked up.”
“What kind of a crack is that! Maybe I’ll keep all of
the T-shirts and give Mother a fan.”
“T thought you were giving the fan to Brenda who
watered your plants and brought in our mail.”
“She’s down to boxes of matches from the hotel.
Look, it’s not how much something cost, it’s the
thought that counts.”
“So you’re still looking for something for your
mother.”
I took the fan out of the box and opened it. It
would just fit into my purse and I could...
I saw my husband looking at me. “Is that the best

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 Homecoming

you can do for a woman who gave you life, raised you,
and stood by you during the good times and the bad
times of your life?”
I threw in a panda bear entwined around a pencil.
“Now are you happy?” I asked.

One tries desperately to cling to joyous, carefree

days and all the cultural enrichment you experienced
on a trip, but it isn’t easy with the inevitable post-
vacation visit from Stan and Doris.
OK, so you don’t expect to reenter your city on
donkeys under a canopy of palms. And you certainly
don’t expect your friends to line the streets waiting for
you to say something meaningful from a hillside. But is
it too much to ask of a small group to listen to you talk
about your trip and politely say, “That sounds like such
fun. I hope you took pictures”?
Stan and Doris also travel and plan their vacations
down to the last detail. They believe that timing is
everything. When they visit St. Peter’s in Rome, the
Pope says Mass. When they fly over Hawaii, a volcano
is erupting ... on their side of the plane. It never rains
on Stan and Doris. They plan it that way.
Not us. When we are standing in front of a panda
bear giving birth, we are out of film. The day we view
Old Faithful, the eruption has all the force of a radiator
that blew its cap. When we are in Russia, Lenin’s tomb
is “leaking again and closed for repairs.”

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 Erma Bombeck

One year we returned from Greece to find Stan

and Doris on our doorstep. “Tell! Tell!” they gushed.
“What did you see?”
Happily, we recounted our three weeks in
Greece—from the Acropolis and Mount Lycabettus to
Constitution Square and the Royal Gardens. We burst
with excitement over our visits to stadiums,
archaeological museums, ruins, temples, and digs.
When we finished, Stan looked at us and said, “You
didn’t eat at Syros Herculonburgers?”
We shook our heads.
“Then you didn’t see Greece,” he said. He turned
to Doris. “Can you imagine the Bombecks going all the
way to Greece and not eating at Syros Herculonburgers?”
Doris dropped into a chair like she had just been
bitten by a viper. “You’re kidding! Next thing you’ll tell
me is they didn’t visit the Athos Flea Market.”
“Where’s the Athos Flea Market?” I asked.
“Oh Stan,” she moaned, “I cannot believe what I
am hearing. Tell me they didn’t pay more than a dollar
fifty for genuine icons at that little shop around the
corner from the hotel.”
As the memories of our travels fade, ironically, so
do the moments of missed airplanes, drafty rooms, lost
baggage, and death marches to view antiquity.
Along about December, something happens that
once again revitalizes me and conjures up fantasies of
faraway places. I realize I have nothing to live for. The
white sales are over, my five-month cold has stabilized

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 Homecoming

in my chest, and I have just received the Semples’

annual Christmas barf-bulletin. This year’s tome is
written by their dog, Max, and signed with a paw print.
I remember Max. He came with them one year. I
never saw the dog’s face. It was either buried in
someone’s crotch or drinking from the toilet.
Anyway, at Christmas, Max, the wonder dog, faxes
resumes of everyone in the family and what they have
been doing for the past year. “Howard had hemorrhoid
surgery but will be ‘rarin’ to go’ again this summer. Fay
got to see “The Love Connection’ last summer when
they were visiting in California and ‘Yes! Chuck
Woolery is a hunk!’
“Howard Jr. is married and cannot come with
them on vacation this year. Edwin is doing nicely at a
halfway house, and the good news is that Sissy, who is
divorced, will be able to make the trek with them to
California this year along with her two babies.” At the
bottom of the sheet, Max has written in a P.S. under his
paw print: “Fay and Howard told me to ask you if you
still remember the gerbils.”
It’s a shame we won’t be home.

249
 Papua
New Guinea

It was the silence that awakened me...that same

ominous chill you get when you stand at a bathroom
door and yell to your kids, “What’s going on in there?”
and a small voice says, “Nothing.”
The Kundiawa Inn, to be referred to in the future
as Motel Hell, had survived the night. I dragged to the
bathroom to see if I had done as well. My eyes looked
and felt like they were on fire. One minute the fever was
taking the curl out of my hair—the next, I was
wrapping up in every piece of clothing I owned to stave

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 Papua New Guinea

off chills. I had lost an uncommon amount of weight.

For a woman who gained three pounds during the
delivery of an eight-pound baby, this was weird.
Steadying myself on the sink, I watched a trickle of
brown water dribble out of the spigot. I fell into bed.
My husband was snapping a suitcase shut. “You
going to be ready to check out in ten or fifteen
minutes?” he asked.
“Don’t ever say ‘check out’ to a sick person,” I
mumbled.
In the lobby, the only reminder of last night’s war
were three policemen having coffee. As I leaned against
the wall for support, my foot hit a small alligator carved
out of wood with his back hollowed out. Through
parched lips I inquired, “Is this for sale?”
My husband materialized at my elbow to witness
the transaction. “Thank God. I thought you were dead.
What are you going to use it for?”
“T don’t know,” I said. “Dips. . . candy .. . nuts.”
“The plane will never get off the ground with all
this stuff.”
Getting a plane off the ground in New Guinea is
right up there with falling from the Empire State
Building with a bungee cord tied around your ankles.
Back home, their airstrips are known as unplowed
fields. They are mined with ruts and rocks. They are
also short. The plane usually aims toward the edge of a
cliff. If the aircraft isn’t airborne by the time it runs out
of runway, the missionaries have a good day.

Zak
 Erma Bombeck

Flying low over the lush green jungles on our way

home, I try to piece together not only the idiotic
nightmare of the night before, but an answer to why we
do this every year. Why do we leave an all-electric
kitchen, people who speak our language, soft beds, safe
drinking water, and toilets where we can sit on the seat?
What were we doing poking into other people’s
lives and cultures? Swatting their flies,worshipping at
their shrines in our stocking feet, and lugging home
Indonesian art to hang over our Santa Fe sofa?
Travel had long ago ceased to be just adventure
and curiosity. For me, it had turned this planet into a
small town—with a “Mayberry RFD” cast of people
who had more in common than we had ever hoped was
possible. We all had children who giggled . . . a belief in
something bigger than ourselves .. . and a need to love
and be loved back. It was a start.
Later that night as we walked into the lobby of one
of Sydney, Australia’s, five-star hotels, we must have
looked like the Clampetts arriving in Beverly Hills.
Our shoes carried the mud of a hundred paths
through the bush. Our clothes reeked of the smoke of a
hundred campfires. Our bodies carried the sweat and
dust of scores of villages and caves. As we blinked from
the brightness of the lights from the elegant chandelier,
I tried feebly to stuff the wooden alligator farther into
my tote bag. A bellhop scurried to help me with another
one of my souvenirs—a three-foot pig made out of
skins. “Is this yours, sir?” My God! He was talking to me!

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 Papua New Guinea

Somehow, I couldn’t absorb it all. My reentry was

too fast. The marble floors, the computers on the desk,
the boutiques, the gift shops, the women in heels, the
men exuding musk. It all seemed so unreal!
I just stood there in the middle of it all in a state of
numbness. From across the lobby, a young, beautiful
woman approached me, smiling. She looked like an
album cover in her white tennis dress and dazzling
smile. She smelled wonderful. “Hi,” she said, “I’m
Olivia Newton-John.”
I sucked in my stomach (thank God, some reflexes
were still working) and tried to explain that we looked
this way because we had just returned from a world of
skies blackened by fruit bats in the early morning hours
. a place where giant frangipani trees rained pungent
petals on you as you passed by and where exotic birds
of dazzling colors ate off your plate at breakfast. But all
I could do was to extend my hand and say, “We’ve been
on vacation.” It seemed to explain everything.
The encounter with Olivia Newton-John seemed to
jar me back to civilization somehow. It gave me a grasp
on reality. My roots needed color. ’'d have to make an
appointment the minute we got home. We had
children. Should we call the kids in New York or take a
chance on having a coronary when we saw the house?
Would there be milk and bread for breakfast in the
refrigerator? The only thing that stood between us and
home now were the airport carousel and customs
experiences.

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 Erma Bombeck

The baggage claim at a port of entry is a study in

subhuman behavior. I am convinced there will never be
a viable hope for world peace until we can get two
hundred people to claim their luggage from a carousel
in an orderly fashion. This flight would be no different
from the others.
When the plane landed, two hundred passengers
sprang into the aisles like someone had just yelled
“Fire!” They dragged carry-ons/coats/souvenirs/
children down miles of corridors until they reached
baggage claim. Gasping and panting, they scoured the
area and arm wrestled one another for the twelve
luggage carts.
The people planted in cement closest to the
carousel were the last to have their luggage come down
the chute. Don’t ask me why that is. It just is.
I was trampled to death by a man who believed his
luggage would be the first piece off. If he were an
experienced traveler, he would know that the first piece
of luggage belongs to no one. It’s just a dummy suitcase
to give everyone hope.
The second and final hurdle between us and home
was the customs line. This is where you stand around,
spitting on your jewelry to make it look worn and in
general trying to look as creditable as Walter Cronkite. I
still felt lousy as I kicked our luggage forward inches at
a time.
“You OK?” asked my husband.
“Tl make it,” I said weakly.

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 Papua New Guinea

The customs officer was riffling through the dirty

underwear of the couple ahead of us. He held up a
giant boomerang and turned it over several times.
The owner felt he had to defend it. “It’s a
boomerang,” he said. There were at least thirty pairs of
eyes focused on this fool who had lugged halfway
around the world a crooked piece of wood that couldn’t
have gotten him 35 cents at a garage sale.
“’m going to put it in my den,” he announced to
all of them. The customs officer just shook his head and
waved him on. Somehow, we all knew he would never
have the same feeling for the purchase as he had when
he bought it.
We were next and I leaned against the counter for
support. “Open ’em up,” commanded the agent,
pointing to our suitcases.
He worked like a surgeon . . . professional and
without emotion as his fingers moved quickly under the
plastic bags and among the shoes stuffed with socks and
bras. Finally, both of his hands met in the bottom of
the suitcase and he carefully extracted three elongated
gourds and held them up for the entire terminal to
view. Then he barked, “What are you going to do with
all these penis gourds?”
It was like one of those scenes when E. F. Hutton
talked and everyone listened. So that’s what they were!
I thought they were primitive artifacts they wore to add
interest to a dull belt. By this time, decent people
behind me were beginning to form opinions about us.

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 Erma Bombeck

Taking a deep breath, I said, “I’m going to use them for

planters.”
He motioned with his hand for me to move on and
turned his attention to the next couple.
The lines from customs counters funneled into one
large mess at the door where you had to show your
passport and your declaration card before you were
cleared to leave the terminal.
By this time, my face was on fire, my eyes were
swollen half shut, and my lips were cracked with fever.
The attendant flipped my passport open and looked
from the photo to my face for confirmation.
“Good likeness.” He smiled.

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31221 05533871755
 (continued from front flap)

of luggage off the carousel? Why am | paying $135 a

day to throw up into a sink shaped like a seashell in
Mexico?
Whether it’s Erma following Ruby's and Rusty’s RV
all the way from Centerville, Ohio, to Canada or riding
inacab-from-hell in Istanbul, you'll enjoy the trip led
by one of America’s most beloved humorists.
When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time
to Go Home is Erma Bombeck at the top of her form,
a Bombeckian tour—de force.

Erma Bomeeck, who is looking for a new passport

photographer, is the author of many bestsellers, in-
cluding | Want to Grow Hair, | Want to Grow Up, |
Want to Go to Boise; Motherhood: The Second Oldest
Profession; and Family: The Ties That Bind. . . and
Gag! She lives in Arizona with her family.

Jacket design © by Mike Stromberg

Jacket photographs © by Steven Van Warner, Phoenix, AZ

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.