Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (15 page)

Blattwurst: Compressed pig parts served in 7-inch units

Grosswurst: Compressed pig parts served in 8-inch units

Wurstwurst: Compressed pig parts served in 7.5-inch units

The list just goes on and on. There is an old German saying that goes, “By the time you have eaten all of the wursts of Germany, you will have
pig parts coming out the Wazzenschnicter.” This certainly proved to be true in our case.

There are a great many spectacularly beautiful villages in Germany, as well as numerous important historic and cultural sites, but you should skip all these because the thing to do is drive really fast. They have these roads in Germany called “autobahns” (meaning, literally, “bahns of the auto”) where you can go as fast as you want because there is
no speed limit
. Really! You can get out there and drive like an amphetamine-crazed maniac, and the police will do nothing! And if you don’t have a car, you can just steal one, because
car theft is also legal
on the autobahn! So are vagrancy, tax evasion, mail fraud, gambling, narcotics trafficking, and full-body massage! You are going to
love
the autobahn.

Greece is where we get a large amount of our Western culture. For example, Zorba the Greek came from there. So did democracy, which is made up of two Greek words, “demo,” meaning “people,” and “cracy,” meaning “wearing stupid hats.” The Greeks also gave us the Pythagorean theorem, although after we graduated from high school we gave it back.

This is a necessary first step.

The biggest city that we have heard of in Greece is
Athens
. According to ancient myth, Athens was created when
Poseidon
, the God of Adventure, struck the ground with his trident, which upset
Ramona
, the Goddess of Humidity and Ranch Dressing, who told
Dagmar
, the God of Variable-Rate Mortgages, who got so mad that he punched
Raoul
, the God of Those Little Colored Things You Sprinkle on Cupcakes, and as a result Athens was formed. Of course we now realize that this is
stupid
. Nevertheless many
important old monuments
remain from this period, including the
Metropolis
, the
Pentathlon, Monticello
, the
Telethon
, and the
Tomb of Reebok
. All of these contain a great deal of
very important architecture
that you are welcome to chip off little pieces of for Show
and Tell. Outside of Athens is another popular area known to locals as
the rest of Greece
.

Holland, also known as “The Hinterlands” or “Sweden,” is a plucky nation that has created large sectors of new land by pushing back the sea with a sophisticated complex of dikes that have held up extremely well so far thanks to the vigilance of the Dutch people, as dramatized by the story of the Little Dutch Boy. Remember him? He was walking along one day many years ago when he saw a small leak in one of the dikes, so he plugged the hole with his finger, thereby saving the entire nation. Talk about pluck! Of course he’s an old man now, and he has taken to telling passersby that one of these days he’s going to pull his finger back out of the goddamn dike and the hell with everybody, but this is no reason for you, as a visitor, to be alarmed, because as a safety precaution, every item of furniture in Holland is legally required to also be usable as a flotation device. Your smart tourist never goes
anywhere in the country without carrying, at minimum, a dinette table.

The largest city in Holland is
Amsterdam
, a cultural center that boasts many beautiful
historic churches
that you can later claim you were visiting when you were in fact looking at
live naked sex shows
involving as many as
17 individual humans
and the occasional unit of
livestock
. Also do not miss the
Vincent van Gogh Museum
, where you can play the popular
Whackan-Ear Game
. Out in the countryside you can see
windmills
, many of which are still used for milling wind, as well as millions and millions and millions of
tulips
, so you’ll probably just want to stick with the
live naked sex shows
.

According to a competing travel guidebook, Iceland offers—this is a direct quote—“boiling mud pools.” We’re on our way!

Ireland is not a large country. A competing guidebook states that “you could drop its entire area into Lake Superior.” We certainly do not wish to start rumors, but sometimes we wonder whether these competing guidebooks are on some kind of narcotics. A quick glance at the map will show you that Ireland is in fact nowhere
near
Lake Superior, which is located in Maine. So if your vacation plans include dropping Ireland into a major body of water, a much better choice, in our opinion, would be the Irish Sea, which is far more conveniently located, although during the peak season we do recommend that you have reservations.

Of course there is more to Ireland than water sports. There is also the Irish people, a warm and
friendly lot who are constantly saying things like “Begorrah!”
⁴
Alcohol will do this to people.

The history of Ireland dates back a long time to the original inhabitants, the Picts, who were a fun-loving tribe known for their wit. “You sure Pict a winner that time!” is the kind of thing they were always saying, until finally a neighboring tribe called the Celtics got sick and tired of it and came in and, in 432 B.C. on October 8, defeated the Picts in the Battle of Defeating the Picts when John Havlicek sank two free throws in overtime. This led to a long period of time that is virtually incomprehensible if you read about it in the 1966 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, which is what we are trying to do, and we are getting a real headache because of sentences like this:

Ha ha! We bet that Giraldus Cambrensis was one fun dude to hang around with! But anyway, Irish history continued to occur right up to the present time, which is where, according to our calculations, we stand today.

The main thing to do in Ireland, as Giraldus “Party Animal” Cambrensis states
(Topographia Hibernica
, ivcxxii, section 3, row d, seat 6), is “sit around and drink.” But no trip to Ireland is complete without a trip to Blarney Castle, where you can kiss the famous Blarney Stone, which, according to ancient legend, bestows upon each person who kisses it a mild but persistent mouth fungus.