Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need

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Authors: Dave Barry
Grant’s Tomb
only
on Wednesdays except during lobster season
or
for those passengers holding odd-numbered transfers and claiming more than 8.5 percent of their gross net deductible pretax noninterest income as medical expenses. If you have any questions about this, helpful attendants inside bullet-proof bomb-proof flame-proof machete-proof token-dispensing bunkers will be morethan happy to continue reading the New York
Post
7 no matter how loud you yell. Or for equal convenience you can take a taxi, which you get by simply raising your hand and then bringing it down sharply on the heads of the various New Yorkers who will try to leap into the taxi ahead of you. Be sure to speak very clearly to the driver, as he probably just arrived from a Third World nation where the major form of transportation is vines. The standard tip for everything in New York City is a smile and a bright, shiny quarter.
    New York State is completely different.
North Carolina and Dakota
    These two dynamic states are usually grouped together because they both begin with “North.” The major products of North Carolina are tobacco and enormous amounts of phlegm. North Carolina also contains the famous “Lost Colony”: ask anyone for directions. North Dakota offers a fascinating array of wheat; the least-crowded time to visit is February.
Ohio
    Ohio proudly calls itself “The Buckeye State,” after the buckeye, a dynamic, hairless carnivorousnocturnal rodent that traps its prey by pretending to offer really good discounts on jewelry. The largest city in Ohio is Cleveland, which, after years of being the butt of many jokes, has risen to assume its rightful role among major American urban areas as the Future Home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We personally visited this attraction, which consisted of an office containing numerous press releases and a model of what the Hall of Fame would look like if it ever got built. The model is about the size of a harmonica. We think it would be a shrewd move on Cleveland’s part to keep it on this scale, rather than building a full-size Hall of Fame, which would probably attract a lot of rowdy people going “WHOOO!” and throwing up on each other. Also, unlike a large building, the model can easily be placed in a briefcase and carried around the country for special events, parties, etc. (“Hey! Somebody sat on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!”).
    Other major Ohio cities include Akron (“The Rubber Capital of the World”) and nearby Canton (“The Spermicidal Lubricant Capital of the World”). Ohio’s Official State Literary Device is the metaphor.
Oklahoma
    The frontier spirit of this dynamic state is best summed up by the Official State Song, from theRodgers and Hammerstein musical
Oklahoma
, which begins:
    Oooo-klahoma
    If I can MAKE it there, I’ll make it AN-y-where!
    This feeling dates back to the famous Oklahoma land rush of the 1880s, when the government opened Oklahoma for settlement and many would-be settlers came in “sooner” than they were supposed to, thereby earning the Oklahoma its proud nickname, “The Nutmeg State.” Modern Oklahoma boasts both plant and animal life as well as the National Softball Hall of Fame, where every day from nine A.M . until six P.M . visitors may get into bitter, sometimes violent arguments over basically nothing. Oklahoma’s Official State Mystery Food Additive is Sodium Erythorbate.
Oregon
    Oregon is called “The Beaver State,” although the University of Oregon team nickname is the “Ducks,” which led to the following actual headline in the Seattle
Times
when an Oregon women’s team lost to a team from the University of Washington (the “Huskies”):
    HUSKY WOMEN SUBDUE DUCKS
    The major industry in Oregon is trying to locate a tree that does not have an ecologist wrapped around it and then cutting it down and selling it to Japan to be converted into price stickers and pasted onto car windows for sale in the United States. Interesting Oregon

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