By the Seat of My Pants: Humorous Tales of Travel and Misadventure • edited by Don George

☀ You can borrow and read By the Seat of My Pants free below. ☀

There’s nothing like reading funny stories of travel mishaps to make you feel happy and snug in your armchair. In his introduction to this ebook of funny travel stories, editor Don George explains the concept of flying by the seat of your pants:

Flying by the seat of your pants is a quintessential part of the traveller’s act and art. You’ll be cruising along with everything seeming to be working out just fine, when suddenly reality tilts and teeters and you’re confronted with something entirely unexpected — a flat tyre, a missed train, a mystifying meal, a kindly but incomprehensible villager, an unmapped fork in the path. Time to put on the pants.

Funny Stories of Bad Travel Experiences

By the Seat of My Pants: Humorous Tales of Travel and Misadventure covers the gamut of bad travel experiences over the course of its 31 tales. Anthropologist Laura Resau gets robbed and temazcaled in Oaxaca. Intrepid adventure traveler Tim Cahill explains how he came to give his friend the nickname “Faeces Foot” in Thailand. Karl Taro Greenfeld’s trip to Ibiza could have been better:

When he stood up, the wall beneath the sideboard had been splattered with blood and the black corpse was shiny with gore. He handed the racquet to me.

‘Now we’ll smoke a cigarette’, he said.

I had to get back to Tokyo.

Jeff Greenwald’s decision to check his 40-kilogram bag at the left luggage department at the Dum Dum Airport, instead of lugging it around India, propelled him through a couple of rings of hell, and brought him in touch with countless others who had, all unknowingly, walked through the same portal of abandoned hope. Doug Lansky’s decision to visit a public bathroom in a Dutch library was no less humorous:

I headed back to the bathroom with renewed confidence, inserted the handle into one of the doors (one that wasn’t jammed with German coins), opened it, and stepped inside. The door swung shut behind me.

The little room was pitch black. And it had just become my jail cell.

Fun times. But, actually, these stories are funny, whatever that says about us, and also serve as cheap therapy, plus, for most people, they squash any nearby travel bugs. Or possibly you’ll be inflamed with desire to replicate Brooke Neill’s Turkish experience:

Josef moved his feet from under me and jumped out of the way. Suddenly I was rolling down a hill in Selcuk wrapped in a carpet. I couldn’t see a thing and I had no idea which direction I was heading in.

Brooke seemed to enjoy being carpet-rolled in Turkey, even the part where she threw up.