Bill Bryson's travel books are mostly like this one, a constant whining about everything. His other non-travel books I love. It's not that I don't get the "humor" in this book, I just think that it isn't funny, not in the least. I should also say that I have lived a full one quarter of my life outside of the United States and I don’t care if someone makes fun of anything and everything American (I’ve done a bit of bashing myself). It was the sort of bridge on which, in the movies, a slat always breaks, causing the heroine to plunge through up toher armpits'.From this the reader is able to gain an understandingof the bridge he had to cross. Bryson is in Washington- he writes of his time spent there as a child. He writes about the impressive features there is- such as The White House, which is ' smaller than you'd expect'. Whilst in Washington he sees the Prime Minister of Japan- Yasuhiro Nakasone who waves at him. He then travels to Philadelphia. He rents a room in a hotel in TimesSquare, which is so small that he can 'touch all four walls at once'.

The Lost Continent Quotes by Bill Bryson - Goodreads The Lost Continent Quotes by Bill Bryson - Goodreads

Julie and I used to take day trips north of Berkeley, and whenever we drove into a town and saw buildings that we didn’t like, we would get out our finger zap guns and make the buildings disappear. By the time we had left a town, it was beautiful. We hated strip malls, gas stations, fast food restaurants, some architecture, and telephone poles. A near perfect townt that I once saw was Etna, CA, just west of Mt. Shasta. It was not fancy, but they had no telephone poles, and they had cowboys. {It was not Etna.)

Bryson is in Las Vegas. He gets a room in a motel 'at the cheaper end of the strip'. He explores and ends up in Caesars Palace, which impresses him due to the surroundings-moving sidewalk etc.

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson - Penguin Books Australia The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson - Penguin Books Australia

Hilarious... he can be suave, sarcastic and very funny... not your typical travel writer Sunday Telegraph Bryson is at Custer Battlefield National Monument. He talks of his dislike of Custer saying 'he screwed up in a mighty big way'. Above all, Iowans are friendly. You go into a strange diner in the South and everything goes quiet, and you realize all the other customers are looking at you as if they are sizing up the risk involved in murdering you for your wallet and leaving your body in a shallow grave somewhere out in the swamps. I regularly found myself looking up these European places and wanting to find out more. His descriptions were beautifully written (especially the Northern Lights, Capri, Austria) and often made me feel like I was standing there too. This was set in 1990 and while Europe is a dramatically different place today, Neither Here, Nor There never felt too outdated. On the occasions it did start to wander into that territory, it came across more like a beautiful snapshot of a bygone era instead. The chapter on Bulgaria was a real-opener in regards to this. It is as funny as anything you'll ever read, as well as being touching, poignant and fascinating. It is the first book I've read since 'Neither Here Nor There' (also by Bryson) that has caused me to think of calling my travel agent.

Chapter 9 starts off with the journey from South Carolina to North Carolina. He visits Biltmore-built by George Vanderbilt. However he travels to Bryson City ( 'a modest indulgence') as Biltmore is too expensive. So I got off the train at Hergenbootensberg and it was raining. Why does it always rain when I travel? The place was a dirty shithole and no one spoke English at all. I went to a travel desk and complained to them and then asked them to find me a room for the night. And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.” Bryson goes to Hannibal to see Mark Twain's childhood home. He talks of movies and actors of his childhood and says these actors would be in his perfect town-Amalgam (to join). Amalgam would be a lot like the locations Hollywood movies are set. Katz was the sort of person who would lie in a darkened hotel room while you were trying to sleep and talk for hours in graphic, sometimes luridly perverted, detail about what he would like to do to various high school nymphets, given his druthers and some of theirs, or announce his farts by saying, 'Here comes a good one. You ready?' and then grade them for volume, duration, and odorosity, as he called it. The best thing that could be said about traveling abroad with Katz was that it spared the rest of America from having to spend the summer with him."