It's easy to get credit cards these days, right? And loans and re-mortgages and so on. Any of us on here could surely get access to, say, 20 grand with little effort.
What I was thinking was, how about spending one whole year going to a different place in the world every weekend. You'd spend the week planning future trips, reading up on the place, learning a bit of the lingo, getting the right jabs and so on. Then, every Friday afternoon you'd set off on a little adventure - the whole thing funded by credit cards.
The trick would be to make the destinations so entertaining that, at the end of the year, you would have enough material for a brilliantly entertaining travel book which would sell by the shopload and easily pay off your cards and leave loads to spare afterwards.
Could you get anywhere in the world and back in one weekend these days? Possibly not some places, but those are probably niche travel-writing markets anyway, usually for heavily bearded adventurers, and no one really wants to hear from them. Everywhere else could be covered, easy.
To keep the book entertaining, you'd need to have a few crises in your personal life, maybe lose your job halfway through the year because you came back to work on Monday morning wearing a grass skirt and a rai of flowers round your neck, having only just made it back from the South Seas an hour before.
But what we really need to know is:
Where would you suggest our adventuring money-borrower should go?
We need 52 answers, anything from Carnival in Rio, to the grand Hollywood premiere of Rambo VII, to tea at your gran's house in Glasgow.
Personal Finance:
1. I'd probably make him go for a physical achievement of some kind. Maybe to cycle up one of those famous Tour de France mountains. That would be easy to get to, a real tough challenge to get through, and quite easy to fill out into an entertaining chapter with some anecdotes from old races and that.
Hmm, sounds a bit bland I suppose, but this whole thing would rely on loads of variety, the reader never knowing what the next weekend was going to bring, then always being brought back to normality on a Monday morning.
n.b. There is no reason why someone shouldn't actually do this.Posts: 8467
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I think you'd struggle to beat Amsterdam for entertaining stories, so that would be my choice.
Someone I used to know called Chris went there. He had a knack for getting into situations that led to the best stories down the pub. He went to Amsterdam once, went to a peep show, got bored and leaned against the wall waiting for it to end. He rejoined his mates and was walking down the street when one of them said, "Chris, what's that on your arm?"
On his jacket arm was a gloop of somebody else's spunk.
Anyway, this idea has sort of been done already by Danny Wallace. He decided to spend a year saying Yes to everything anybody said to him, which means that he accepted offers for credit cards left right and centre, and went to Amsterdam, Thailand, Australia and I-forget-where-else. Amazon advert for Yes Man by Danny Wallace.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: It's easy to get credit cards these days, right?
Lol, no, it's bloody not.
Great idea though. Will think about it, maybe.
It reminds me a story I heard about a bloke who was a bit of a writer of some kind and was thinking of ideas for a new money spinner, so he came up with the idea of getting on the British tiddlywinks team, and writing a book about it.
It might not have been tiddlywinks, but it was something daft like that.
Anyway, yes, he managed to start doing it, and wrote up his book plan and first two chapters, or however one does it, and got the advance from the publisher, and then went for it and did indeed become British tiddlywinks champion. Possibly.
And, presumably, wrote the rest of the book. Though I've never seen it on sale or heard about it since.
So there's a lesson there for you, Dang, maybe. Or not.
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I forgot that lots of other people write these sort of books. I think I mainly forgot because they are exactly the sort of books I never, ever read. But that doesn't mean that other people don't read them. There's obviously a huge market for shit like that. There's one in the shops at the moment called something like, "Penguins Stopped Play". I think it's about some bunch of tossers that go around playing cricket all over the place. Jesus.
Or they always have to have some unbreakable rule they have to follow, like the Yes Man one. Maybe my hero could switch on the radio at 11:30 am every Monday and he had to go to the first place that was mentioned, unless he'd already been there a couple of weeks before or something - so he wouldn't have to go to Iraq every weekend.
No, I don't fancy sticking to regulations like that. It should be just a matter of saying, this year I'm going to Carnival, and the Pamplona Bull Run, and a sunset in Hawaii... blah blah blah.
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quote:Originally posted by Lickapaw#2: I think you'd struggle to beat Amsterdam for entertaining stories, so that would be my choice.
I like Amsterdam, but I think this is a foolish boast - alot of people's stories from Amsterdam run along the same lines - ate some hash cakes and fell over while looking at a prostitute. I reckon someone could get into more unusual and amusing scrapes in places like Mexico City, Moscow and maybe Beirut, where the general rules of survival start to shift away from what you're familiar with.
Nonetheless, I reckon I'd send our boy to Las Vegas where he could go hunting for bambi. If, as has been rumoured/ proven with facts, the whole thing is a hoax, he has to re-enact that whole scenario by chasing down a Las Vegas stripper, shooting her with an actual gun, and then having sex with her.
-------------------- Now that you've called me by name? Posts: 2007
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Could you get anywhere in the world and back in one weekend these days? Possibly not some places, but those are probably niche travel-writing markets anyway, usually for heavily bearded adventurers, and no one really wants to hear from them. Everywhere else could be covered, easy.
Um... not sure about your logic here. I'm just back from Sydney via Bangkok (out) and Hong Kong (rtn) and it's not as if Aus and NZ are the only places you couldn't do there-and-back in a weekend; I'd say anywhere in East Asia would be a real push. It's a 14 hour flight to Hong Kong. That's without the 3 hours check-in time and the hour or so to clear customs and get your baggage. And without factoring in jetlag.
So if you say 18 hours minimum to that part of the world, if you leave after work on Friday you'll get there at midday on Saturday. You'd have to leave at 6am Sunday to have any chance of getting home by the end of the weekend. That's ignoring the fact that you'd be pretty wiped out by the flight.
I'm leaving out time differences because I'm too stupid to work out how they affect this calculation.*
Anyway I think it makes everywhere in East Asia impossible, and Australasia is obviously out of the question as it's about 28 hours one way from your UK airport.
How far is the West Coast of the US? 11 hours or so? Pretty tight. I doubt you'd see much of LA over a weekend.
----------------- * I would like to see Ringo working this sort of thing out conclusively. He was very good at proving that it'd be totally impractical to run an ITunes van. In fact, I think that was one of your ideas too, dang.
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Also not sure how you're classifying Australia (I assume this is what you mean in terms of places you couldn't do over a weekend?) as bearded-adventurer territory.
-------------------- pudgy little saucepot Posts: 738
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quote:Originally posted by wonderstarr: * I would like to see Ringo working this sort of thing out conclusively. He was very good at proving that it'd be totally impractical to run an ITunes van. In fact, I think that was one of your ideas too, dang.
Ringo is my nemesis, yes.
Good thing Churchill didn't have Ringo as an advisor in 1940, eh?
[* strokes bulldog, tucks thumb in union jack waistcoat pocket *]
As for the small matter of not being able to get to places and back in a weekend... well, yes, you're right of course, but it's only a year we have to fill. Most of proper History is within easy reach then. And a fair bit of wilderness too.
Anyway, I've had a rethink about this and decided that what my hero would cover would be 52 things which had influenced him. So, easy examples might be Down And Out In Paris And London or the Beatles Abbey Road album cover.
But branching out into more obscurity and curiosity, obviously. I think a good writer could make this genuinely entertaining and not just pose-y.
It could also be a radio series quite easily. With a website. [* comes *]
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