Michael Brein
Travel Tales: Close Calls & Great Escapes Volume 1 is the first of a two-book companion set in the True Travel Tales series of very scary travel tales of danger in your travels and managing to just barely escape. It is a collection of the fearful and dangerous sorts of things that can and do happen to travelers, but mostly these will not happen to you. You’ll read examples the real, raw fear and very unsettling occasions that may pop up now and again in your travels.The two books include true tales of close calls and great escapes in connection with all sorts of travel situations including chases, foiled kidnappings, attacks, roadblocks, scary places, trips from hell, borders and police, hitchhiking, international spying, smuggling, and intrigue, being in the wrong places at the wrong times, terror attacks, bandits, Mexican standoffs, airplane crashes, accidents and mishaps, white slavery, robberies, sexual harassment and assaults and more.This two volume series is the place to read about the accounts of the dangers and mishaps of others. And you’ll gain a healthier respect of what it is like to experience the true dangers and risks of travel and adventure. And with a better a better knowledge and respect of travel and its dangers and risks, hopefully, you’ll gain a better sense of safety, security, enjoyment and appeciation of your travels.Close Calls and Great Escapes includes many examples of bad things that happen to travelers despite their best efforts to avoid such things. But bad things DO happen on occasion, and the best thing to do is, of course, to avoid them in the first place. But if we cannot, we should at least do our best to escape them. Again, while there’s no easy, simple miracle list of failsafe strategies for always staying safe and secure in each dangerous situation that may arise, there are, nevertheless, meaningful takeaway strategies from the many examples presented in these books that will enable you to develop and keep in mind ways to enhance personal safety and security and reduce the risks of potentially dangerous outcomes in travel.While many of the tales in these two book are not strictly about life and death situations surrounding travel, many are about difficult, embarrassing, and otherwise annoying nuisances that we all would do well to better avoid and do without.The scope and variety of close calls in these two book may surprise you. And some would never likely even occur to you. Some are even humorous, like, for example, the many examples of exotic foods that you’d never eat on a dare back home, but are, instead, all in when it comes to trying, say, pressed rabbit in Peru or even steak tartare during your travels in the south of France! (I won’t be the spoiler and reveal it to you here!)Yes, such an adventures may or may not ever happen to you, but after reading about it in these book, should at least give you pause — who knows? Maybe you’ll never, ever eat such a bizarre, strange dish in the first or next instance.Sure, you’ll read stories in this book series that will alert you to situations that may never even occur to you. But if you avoid even one new travel danger that you might never have even thought of by reading these books, then I’ll have accomplished a very useful purpose.
