Entertaining read about an Australian guy who worked as a tour leader for a travel company and the antics the crew and travellers got up to on his many trips through Europe. Very easy to read, although it has turned me off organised tours altogether (I suspect it was Contiki that he worked for!).

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From the back cover:
Crew manual rule no. 5: Crew must not engage in sexual activity on board the bus with passengers or fellow employees.
Crew manual rule no. 2: Learn all names on day one.
Crew manual rule no. 3: Don't get lost.

But then, who follows the rules?
Brian Thacker confesses all as he reveals the best (and worst) of twenty trips as a tour leader around Europe. He reveals how he fed passengers hamburgers made from breakfast cereal, horse-meat spag bog and roosters' testicles. How he left a passenger standing by the side of a motorway in France for three hours in his underwear clutching a purple toothbrush, and how he lost his driver, his cook, his bus, ten brightly coloured canal bikes, a large church and eventually his patience.

Reserved for the OZ VBB.

RELEASE NOTES:
Posted on to tqd who selected it from the OZ VBB!

Well, this one took some massive detour on its way to Sydney from Brisbane! Three months! Maybe it went via the Arctic Circle or something. Anyhow, it (and several other missing packages) mysteriously appeared this morning on my doorstep. Hurrah for Australia Post finally sorting out the snafu! Boo to them for not sorting it out earlier (or explaining what went wrong either). I hope someone got a smack on the wrist over it all.

And I found a second hand copy of this the other week and bought it and read it already and released it (and it got caught!), since I thought this particular copy was definitely lost forever. So I shall offer this one back up on the Oz VBB, or take it along to a meetup. It was a really rather fun read, I did enjoy it.

Thanks very much for your patience, briz-cowgirl! I'm glad the book did finally turn up, and I'm looking forward to it finding another reader, who I hope will enjoy it too.

UPDATE 7 June 2008: Offered up on the Oz VBB and snaffled by AmberC. I shall get it in the mail to her asap!

UPDATE 13 June 2008: And in the mail to AmberC today. Happy reading!

Arrived today.

Laugh out loud funny in places. Some bits I couldn't resist reading out to anyone close by.

I now have a list of must NOT see museums if I ever get to Europe.

Posting to Libertine101 as a thankyou for a wishlist book.

Oh, this looks like my kinda book. :)
Thank you so much for the suprise!

Very funny, very crazy, wacky stuff. I sure do not have what it takes to be a tour guide and that's not just cause I have a crap sense of direction! I don't think I woud have the stamina or patience! Good to see the author had a sense of humour about his job, even when things went wrong.
Having read this book, I am so glad I never did the 18-30 year olds tour thing. Does NOT sound like my cuppa tea. Perhaps I love my luxuries too much...or just have an aversion to drunken people, Cold Chisel songs etc ;P
I found that quite a bit of the humour had Austraian references (understandabe, considering the authors nationaity). Not a problem for me, of course, but got me wondering how much would have gone past other readers. Oh well. Their loss ;P

The one thing in the book though, that was very off putting to me, was when Thacker admitted to and joked about kicking a pigeon.
If I ever meet him, I'd tell him how much I enjoyed his humour but then give him a swift kick where it hurts the most.
It's only fair.

Picked up at the Perth BC Meetup last weekend. I've read fictioanlised account of tour guides in Europe - will be interested to see how the real thing compares!! :-)

Took to a local book club meetup.