>> Visit Hoteliers Book Shop!!

Feeling bad that you can’t afford a vacation? Travel books with titles like
Don’t Go There! and I Should Have Stayed Home may make you feel
better. For $15 or so, you’ll get a laugh out of vacation horrors that you’ll be
happy to miss.

Other travel books out this year include coffee-table beauties — big books
with luscious photos about places most people only dream of visiting anyway.
They’re the perfect fantasy escape for the armchair traveler whose budget will
not permit a getaway any time soon. The big books are expensive — $40 and up –
but they make nice gifts as a consolation for someone grounded by the economy.
Or buy one for yourself; it’s cheaper than a plane ticket.

>> Visit Hoteliers Book Shop!!

HORRORS: Since 1994, a small Michigan-based
publisher, RDR Books, has been publishing a series called "I Should Have Stayed
Home." Two new editions were added this year: I Should Have Stayed Home
Hotels: Hospitality Disasters at Home and Abroad and I Should Have Stayed
Home Food: Tantalizing Tales of Extreme Cuisine ($14.95 each). "Collectively
these stories have become a national archive of trouble travel," said publisher
Roger Rapoport.

The latest compendium of hotel nightmares features tales of rooms afflicted
with bugs, mold and sickening odors; a group of high school students who ended
up lodging in a brothel on a trip abroad; and a B&B that shook all night
from passing trains. The food book tells of restaurants where the diners were
assaulted; Thanksgiving spent on an island where turtle, not turkey, was the
main course; and food poisoning stories from around the globe.

>> Visit Hoteliers Book Shop!!

Travel maven Peter Greenberg has a new book called Don’t Go There!: The
Travel Detective’s Essential Guide to the Must-Miss Places of the World
(Rodale, $17.95). The book lists which cruise ships are cited most often for
outbreaks of intestinal viruses; which highways have high accident rates; which
hotels are known for bedbugs; and which
cities and countries are the most polluted, dangerous and diseased.

Greenberg’s must-miss list includes the "Tour de Stench," sponsored by the
Sierra Club, a tour of counties in Kentucky with strong odors from factory
farms; as well as the summer back-ups on roads leading to the exclusive beaches
of the Hamptons, on Long Island. He also shares his views on the worst times to
visit places like New York (he says avoid Christmas and New Year’s Eve because
of the crowds), and asks other travel experts for their stay-away
recommendations. One contributor suggested travelers avoid over-visited world
heritage sites like Machu Picchu , because "you shouldn’t go there until they
figure out how to preserve and present the site properly."

Lonely Planet‘s new travelogue Flightless: Incredible Journeys Without
Leaving the Ground ($15) is entertaining without necessarily making you feel
that you must do these trips yourself. Indeed, some stories, like the one by a
man who walked from London to Istanbul, may make you glad you weren’t along for
the ride (or the hike). Other tales include accounts of a tour of Italy on a
40-year-old Vespa, a group that bicycled around the world, and a trek along the
Silk Road by bus and shared taxi.

COFFEE TABLE BOOKS: National Geographic’s Sacred Places of a Lifetime: 500
of the World‘s Most Peaceful and Powerful Destinations ($40) takes you from
the Maya temples of Guatemala to the Shwedagon Pagoda in Myanmar to Israel’s
Western Wall to Mardi Gras and carnivals around the world. It also includes a
section on retreats and other places of contemplation from Nepal to France.

Also from National Geographic, Visions of Paradise ($35), offers
answers from photographers to the question, "Where is heaven on earth?" The
results ranged from an aerial view of New Yorkers on the grassy lawn of an urban
park, to a snowy empty road in Fargo, N.D., to the watery caves of Hawaii’s
NaPali Coast. Around the world, photographers found paradise in the coral reefs
of Papua New Guinea, the monarch butterfly migration to Mexico, and a
snow-covered footbridge in Sweden north of the Arctic Circle.