Did you know that the Milan airport only stocks John Grisham and Danielle Steel novels and nothing else!
Having never been (yet!) to the Milan airport I will have to take travel writer John Finn’s word for it. You see, Finn gets stuck on a 12 hour flight with nothing to read (apparently Grisham and Steel don’t count)…plus no iPod, no in-flight entertainment (it did not work) and his wife was reading her own book (good for her for not caving in and handing over her own book). Makes you wonder what good old Chris Columbus, Magellan and Vasco da Gama or Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell (…well Freya and Gertrude were probably traveling with books- they were pretty smart ladies, but you get the gist…) were doing for months traveling around the globe without reading materials, iPods and other in-flight entertainment.
Cute article but pleaseeeee….I have done more hours then Finn’s 12 on a single bus ride in the middle of Guatemala with a dead chicken in my face (plus an even longer train ride with a cranky sister over the Andes) with no reading-too much motion to read, iPods, or in-flight entertainment (plus I had no stewardess, air conditioning or clean bathroom as Finn did). Makes you wonder why a travel writer is so whiny! Perhaps he was short of a story and needed to come up with something fast?
Well to read the hysterically funny and smart-ass article about what happened when a travel writer is stranded on an airplane with NOTHING TO READ! (The horror! The horror!) checkout:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/25/TREQ1043QJ.DTL
(thanks to http://www.bookdwarf.com/ for originally posting this article)