2 books dish out handy travel advice, Top 10 tips for the Big Apple
“Last-Minute Travel Secrets: 121 Ingenious Tips to Endure Cramped Planes, Car Trouble, Awful Hotels, and Other Trips from Hell”
Chicago Review Press, $16.99
Pragmatic-minded Joey Green has written plenty of books — more than 50 of them in fact — and has traveled many a mile. When he and his wife were traveling on their honeymoon, for example, they carried with them two aerosol cans in their backpacks: disinfectant in hotel rooms, train compartments and ship cabins and an insecticide to “ward off any six-legged pests.” He’s certainly a resourceful fellow, as this very useful book proves. But he insists that anyone with “a little ingenuity” can turn everyday items into unconventional tools to overcome unanticipated travel disasters. Green divides the book into eight broad categories: packing tricks, airplanes and airports, hotels “and hovels,” cruise ships, trains and buses, cars, recreational vehicles and camping.
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Virtually every page is full of handy advice. The more unusual tips include how to find your car in a parking lot with nothing but a water bottle, how to cook a grilled cheese sandwich with an iron, how to waterproof a map with hair spray, how to exfoliate your face and legs with sugar packets, how to uncork a wine bottle with a sneaker, how to sleep on a plane with a beach ball, how to desalinate and purify ocean water with a T-shirt, how to clean sneakers with toothpaste and how to recharge a dead car battery with red wine, among many others.
Green also includes practical sidebars, ranging from how to get access to first-class airport lounges and snagging the best seat on a train or bus to avoiding catching a cold on a plane (bring your own sweater or jacket rather than using the airline pillows and blankets). He also suggests a baker’s dozen ideas of great uses for dental floss when traveling, including repairing eyeglasses and suturing a wound.
And since we live in uncertain times, Green offers advice on how to incapacitate a hijacker with a pot of coffee and how to electrocute a hotel intruder with a table lamp.
“Top 10 New York City 2016”
DK Eyewitness Travel, $14
The best-selling DK Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides have been upgraded with a serieswide re-launch, just in time for the busy summer travel season. Among the upgrades are new itineraries; new laminated pull-out maps with color-coded design, public transportation maps and street indexes; time-saving maps of walking routes; new Top 10 lists of off-the-beaten-track ideas; and a new typography and layout.
The first set of the revamped books includes guides to New York City, London, Barcelona, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Rome, Berlin and Iceland. The remainder of the updated guides will be released through 2018.
It’s always fun to peruse the Top 10 lists. The Top 10 figures in New York history, for example, feature two people currently in the news: the long-dead but hugely popular Alexander Hamilton and the very-much-alive and active Donald Trump. The Metropolitan Museum of Art tops the list of the Top 10 museums, Le Bernardin on the Upper West Side heads the list of Top 10 restaurants, the King Cole Bar and Lounge in the St. Regis Hotel leads the list of the Top 10 bars and lounges and the Beacon Theatre wins the prize for Top 10 music venues.
But “Top 10 New York City” also features lesser-known destinations. Governors Island, smack dab in the middle of New York Harbor, tops the list of off-the-beaten-path selections. Others on the list include Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; Roosevelt Island and Tramway, one of the oldest aerial commuter tramways in the U.S.; and the popular waterfront Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook.
Each neighborhood section includes descriptions of area highlights, restaurants and recommended walking itineraries. The guide also includes Top 10 sites in the outer boroughs, from the Bronx Zoo to historic Richmond Town, a restored village of 29 buildings on Staten Island.
June Sawyers is a freelance writer.
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