The Travel Detective
Chapter One
Most of us love to travel. That's the good news.
The bad news: We hate the process of travel.
We've been abused. And after each trip, we tell ourselves we'll never do it again.
And yet, we can't wait to do it all over again. And we do.
To many people, travel remains a voyage-or a flight or an Interstate trip-of discovery. But to most of us, travel remains a ritual of reassurance. Where there's a whim ... there's a way. And even though we hate the process, we continue to travel.
In 1999, more than 1.3 billion people traveled by air. The average American traveler is 44 years old. Of all American adult travelers, 49 percent are men, 64 percent are married, and 48 percent have children.
We travel to escape, or to explore, or to rest. Travel is, for many of us, an exercise in renewal, or a test of our limits. And some of us travel, simply, because we CAN.
And we DO. In a recent American Express study of 200 developing and developed countries, travel and tourism were found to be the biggest industry. In fact, if travel and tourism were a country instead of an industry, its gross national product (GNP) would rank among the top five in the wor ... read full excerpt from The Travel Detective ebook
