Joey Green, Last-Minute
Travel Secrets: 121 Ingenious Tips To Endure Cramped Planes, Car Trouble, Awful
Hotels, and Other Trips from Hell (Chicago IL: Chicago Review Press, 2016).
Available in paperback, Nook and Kindle.
Non-fiction / humor
Recommended by Wilda Morris
Joey Green must have had his fingers crossed or his
tongue in his cheek while he was writing Last
Minute Travel Secrets. He certainly has provided an enjoyable read—and a
lot of helpful hints. On the other hand, some “hints” seem to have made it into the
book only to get a laugh. For instance, Green devotes two pages to instructing the
reader on how to jump from a moving train. He warns us, however, that if you
jump, you will hit the ground at approximately the same velocity as the train,
which could cause great bodily injury or even death. “Realize,” he says, “that
if you survive the initial impact and subsequent rolling, your injuries will
doubtlessly require hospitalization.” After this warning, he tells us what to
do “if you still wish to jump.” It helps if you boarded the train with pillows,
blankets, newspapers, etc., to help cushion your fall.
Frequent travelers may, however, want to make use of some of
his suggestions on how to hide cash and credit cards (especially since
travelers checks are largely a thing of the past), how to avoid getting air
sick or seasick, and (if traveling with children) how to entertain young
travelers by turning the airsickness bag into a puppet. I definitely plan to
use one or two of his suggestions on how to mark my luggage so I will recognize
it when it comes off an airplane. Just for fun, I might try his directions on
how to make grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron.
On a recent trip, I could have benefited from Green’s advice
to turn off or reset the alarm clock in a hotel room—the alarm went off at
midnight. I struggled to turn the clock radio off in the dark. Unfortunately, I
hit the snooze button, so the radio came back on just as I had about gotten
back to sleep. My late uncle, Aaron Webber, once fell into the trunk of his car
and was locked in when the truck lid fell on him. Unfortunately he had not seen
Green’s instructions on how to get out of a car trunk. Fortunately someone (his
grandson, if my memory serves me right) came into the garage and heard him
knocking on the trunk lid, and released him from captivity.
Green provides numerous suggestions for using panty hose
(make your own back-scrubber, remove cactus spines from your skin, store
onions, etc.); dental floss (repair your glasses if a screw is lost; sew
buttons on a coat; slice cake, cheese or cheesecake cleanly, remove cookies
from a cookie sheet); pill or Tic Tac bottles or boxes (storing Bobby pins,
spices, fishing tackle, matches, vitamins, etc.), and condoms (making a
portable shower or cell-phone protector, or stress ball). Green seems
especially fond of maxi pads.
Maxi pads first appear on page 24, where Green provides
directions for turning 6 maxi pads and a decorative strip of paper into a pair
of “comfortably padded and surprisingly cozy” slippers. Page 25 lists a dozen
more uses for maxi pads, from cleaning a windshield to protecting a blister;
from improvised nursing pads to protection for your knees when scrubbing
floors. Maxi pads appear again on page 38 (“How to Fashion a Sleep Mask . . .
.”), page 47 (“How to make a Diaper out of a Maxi Pad and a Hand Towel, and
page 149 (“How to Fog-Proof Your Windshield with Shaving Cream and a Maxi Pad”).
The directions for jumping off a train are not the only hints
I have no interest in trying. I won’t follow his suggestions for sneaking
alcohol through customs, try to electrocute an intruder, wash my sweaty clothes
with soap in a swimming pool (sounds like a good way to get evicted), or
hot-wires a car ignition with a screwdriver (“Doing so destroys the ignition
cylinder,” Green warns). I would also feel a bit odd were I to “Improvise
Earplugs with Tampons,” even though “the strings . . . give the tampons a
decorative touch, like fancy earrings” and “make removal a snap.” The picture
of the author in his airplane seat with his ears plugged is worth a laugh,
though, so I was glad he included this hint.
I should also mention that Green fills the space at the
bottoms off a number of pages with tidbits of information. For instance, he
tells us that “Golf balls always spin backward when struck,” repeats the
warning against the use of egg cartons in craft activities because of the risk
of salmonella, and lists three cities that have painted their water towers to
resemble beach balls. No, I won’t repeat the tampon stories here.
For a mixture of helpful advice, tongue-in-cheek suggestions
worthy of The Onion or National Lampoon (Green actually does
write for National Lampoon, Rolling Stone and other periodicals),
and trivia, I highly recommend
Last-Minute Travel Secrets.
