“Over the last decades, the travel industry and media have unwittingly teamed up to create the gap this book aspires to fill. I read a lot of travel sections, travel sites, and travel magazines, and I realized one day I was getting punch-drunk on how fantastic everything was. There s just so much Escape, Undiscovered, Quaint, Top 10 Most Amazing . . . , Secret Beaches, Incredible Islands, Savvy, Frugal, Best Ever. These adjectives just don t connect with most of my experiences on the road life, misadventure, and a dose of Murphy s Law often get in the way.”

“Air travel is such a strange experience. It´s such an intimate thing, to travel alongside a stranger for so many hours, to eat together, take in a film, snooze side by side. In economy I think that it´s so intimate, that like neighbours on the same landing, most of us consider that it´s better not to take the risk of ever getting to know them. In business class, there´s just enough room - as elbows don´t actually touch - to take that chance.”

“Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. Travel is realizing that “age thirty” should be shed of its goddamn stigma.”

“In the old days, when he flew a lot, he'd never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he'd spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that's what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements, but instead he'd sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.”

“From Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story, re: the travel book boom of the 1970sSurprisingly, none of the new developments in travel publishing came from established companies. The changes in the air seemed to completely bypass them and when they did wake up to the upsurge in growth it was too late -- they'd been overtaken. Much the same happened a decade later with computer books. Just as the travel book explosion was led by travelers who got into publishing rather than publishers getting into travel, so the computer book explosion was led by computer geeks getting into publishing. The regular publishers never saw it coming.”

“...what I'm getting at is like the distinction between tourist and a traveler. The tourist experience is superficial and glancing. The traveler develops a deeper connection with her surroundings. She is more invested in them -- the traveler stays longer, makes her own plans, chooses her own destination, and usually travels alone: solo travel and solo participation, although the most difficult emotionally, seem the most likely to produce a good story.”