Product Description

"When you travel, things go wrong." That might not sound like uplifting advice, but in this hilarious collection of stories about mishaps in faraway places, award winning humorist Dave Fox proves otherwise. At age eight, Dave moves to England and nearly starts a riot in Northern Africa. As a nerdy teenager, he smuggles illegal radio equipment into Finland on his way to spending a year in Norway. In his college days, he discovers it is not wise to seek inner peace inside an Icelandic volcano, and he thwarts the Italian Mafia, only to find himself surrounded by machine gun-toting cops in Greece. A few years later, he does something exceptionally reckless. He becomes a professional tour guide. Whether he's chasing down runaway sheep in Ireland, munching antibiotics in Turkey, interviewing drunken nomads above the Arctic Circle, or helping diffuse knife fights in the Vatican, Dave travels knowing that when things go wrong, they might not seem funny at the time, but the resulting stories are worth the chaos. Getting Lost: Mishaps of an Accidental Nomad spans 30 years of adventures and misadventures overseas, from Dave's year as a British school boy, to his teenage days as a foreign exchange student, to so-called "adult life" as a professional traveler. He weaves together tales both poignant and funny in this comical memoir of a travel-obsessed geek. "Dave Fox's writing is hilarious.... It's rare to find a person who has such unique stories to tell and can write about them to boot." - Tim Bete, Director of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1024913 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 268 pages

About the Author
Dave Fox is an award winning humor and travel writer. He has lived in England, Norway, and Turkey, and traveled in roughly 40 countries. He has devoted his life to exploring foreign cultures and trying not to make a mess of things.

In 2004, Dave won the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop Book Proposal Contest. Getting Lost: Mishaps of an Accidental Nomad is his resulting collection of humorous stories about things that have gone wrong in his overseas wanderings.

Dave is a veteran tour guide for European travel guru Rick Steves, and a former public radio news anchor. He has served as a Scandinavian cultural consultant to the History Channel and been an opening speaker for Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise.

His work has been published in books by Rick Steves and Lonely Planet, in a variety of national magazines and newspapers, and in letters to his mother, though not often enough if you ask her. He has also produced an audiobook CD, The Fox that Quacked: Essays from Planet Earth, which is available on his humor website at davethefox.com.

Customer Reviews

Be Careful Which Edition You Buy
Please be careful which edition of this book you buy. The first edition (with sheep on the cover) was self-published and self-edited. The new edition (with a crazy-looking cow on the cover) went through a more thorough, professional editing process and was published by a more reputable publisher. The writing and editing are much better in the second (cow) edition.

If you are into collecting limited edition books, autographed copies of the first edition are available at davesbook.com, but if you are ordering from Amazon and want the most polished edition of this book, just say moo! Be sure to order the second edition, published by Inkwater Press. (On Amazon, there are links between the two editions on each edition's page.)

For the traveler in all of us!
This is the sort of book that - for me - is great to read just a few chapters right before sleep, in hopes of conjuring up travel dreams. "Getting Lost" brought back so many forgotten travel memories of my own, as well as inspired me to plan for some long-overdue travel this coming year. Read this book! And be ready for some good laughs. "Getting Lost" definitely goes on my top 10 list for this year!

Incredibly funny and equally informative
The best way to summarize my feelings about LETTING GO is to say that it is a totally enjoyable read. It's witty. It's clever. It's funny. And it's informative.

Dave Fox has a gift for sharing his travel adventures with the reader. His personal style combines with a warm and very active sense of humor to place the reader right alongside Dave as he explores, for example, the ancient and mysterious streets of Istanbul, allowing one to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of a foreign culture.

You laugh. You learn. You laugh some more. And you don't want it to end.