Travel Tales

Travel Tales: Getting Away With It — Or Almost! is about what travelers get away with doing themselves. Yes, they may perpetrate their own schemes on fellow travelers or even the locals themselves. Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don’t. This book collects the curious along with some extraordinarily funny situations travelers sometimes get themselves into that they’d normally not do at home. This book includes the true tales of what travelers try to get away with while free of the controls of their normal daily lives at home.While traveling, you often strive to be all you can be, good or bad, and sometimes rightly or wrongly so. You behave, after all, often just to see if you can do it — if you can get away with it! You are an ’Actor’ playing roles you’d never dream of doing back at home. You might try foods or drinks you’d never dream of consuming back home. Or you might steal ashtrays, bathrobes, hotel keys, and even license plates as souvenirs that you’d never dream of doing back home. You might try to get into places without paying. You might pretend to be someone you’re not, like crashing a party given by a famous movie star. You might try to sneak around the Metro without paying, not because you didn’t have the money, but because you just wanted to see if you could do it. Some stories may border on being abject criminal acts like the guy who treated his friends to free dinners by paying for them using fraudulent credit cards. Some travelers smuggle. Some things people get away with are silly, funny, mischievous, or ridiculous even. One man, for instance, poured bubble bath in London’s Trafalgar Fountain flooding the square with soap bubbles!Some tales involve doing some not-so-good things to fellow travelers. We don’t condone some things that travelers have done, but don’t we secretly admire some things some people manage to pull off? For example, some people secretly rooted for DB Cooper who hijacked an airplane over the Pacific Northwest.Travel is often a time to test yourself, to see what you are made of. Oh, we all get away with some harmless silly things that hurt no one. And to some extent, that is who we are. We travel, we grow up, we mature. Yes, we do things we wish we hadn’t and that we’re not proud of. In our True Travel Tales series, in Pickpockets & Other Thieves, we help you travel more safely and securely, helping you to avoid pickpockets who will happily relieve you of your money, valuables, and passport. In Cons, Scams & Ripoffs we help you steer clear of cons and scams that separate you from your money in a variety of deceitful ways that also cause you untold discomfort and distress. And finally, in this book, Getting Away With It, it’s your turn to learn the accounts of the sorts of things that some of us pull off that are not strictly legal and sometimes smack of things that we’re not all that proud of doing. Yes, this book may cause you to take a closer look at yourself and see some of the things that you as a traveler do that maybe you wish you hadn’t done at all. Pickpockets and other thieves, and con artists and scammers are the sorts of people we want to stay away from. And our getting away with some things ourselves that we may not be all that proud of is a part of the process of growing up and learning what we should avoid doing in the first place or at least grow out of.