By Allan Fallow
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, August 25, 2008

It's not that I travel under a cloud, I like to believe, it's just that my journeys are more eventful than most. I've traced their troubled origin to the 1957 Cadillac limousine my father bought with his winnings from a single, stupendous night of poker. It was a 17-foot-long monument to the glory that was chrome, and on the day he drove it home and berthed it in the driveway, his six children flocked around like Apollo groupies at the Kennedy Space Center. (This was 1966, after all.) My father delighted in demonstrating one feature over and over: A thick pane of privacy glass could be raised behind the driver, walling off my parents from the bedlam in the back.

Into this behemoth we all piled that summer, headed for a supposedly restful week on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. The Caddy carried the eight of us from Maryland to New Hampshire without betraying its age. In the lakeside village of Meredith, however, the transmission seized up with a sickening "schlunk!"

A local tow truck driver captured our predicament with Yankee thrift: "Won't go fahwahd -- won't go backwahd!" He then towed the contraption to his garage. Trapped in the fishbowl of the limo's passenger compartment, my brothers, sister and I rebuffed sidewalk gawkers with the Frozen Stoic Face Method pioneered by my mother.

I had discovered a fundamental truth about authentic travel -- its mascot is the stomach butterfly, not the bluebird of happiness.

This was confirmed the morning I threw Howard Swain's wallet off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Ninth-grade classmates on a school trip to Italy, we were intent on re-creating Galileo's demonstration that objects of the same material but differing weight fall at equal speeds. I grabbed a heavy leather book bag in one hand and Howard's light leather wallet in the other, then climbed the tower's 293 stairs (all in the name of empirical physics, you understand), leaned over the railing and dropped both items at the same moment.

The book bag plummeted 186 feet to the ground. Howard's wallet was less respectful of Galilean precedent: It unfolded like a parachute halfway down, then rode a gust of wind to land in the cypress-walled courtyard of the Convento Cappuccini Santa Chiara, a nunnery that had been off-limits to men since its completion in the 14th century.

The mists of time come in handy in cases such as these, veiling precisely how we retrieved Howard's wallet, but I recall some extravagant sign language and a tour bus that left town in a hurry.

Jump one continent west and two decades forward for a demonstration of why nothing can top the gluttony of the sea when it comes to consuming travel necessities. In 20 years of beach visits from Delaware to North Carolina, I have inadvertently fed the ravening Atlantic a steady diet of paper currency, plastic combs, car keys and eyeglasses (it's a blessing you can't see how fast they sink). "If a riptide ever sucked you out to sea," my wife reassured me as Hurricane Felix chased us off Ocracoke Island in August 1995, "I wouldn't panic -- I'd just tell the lifeguards to follow the floating debris."

Long-distance trains make equally ideal venues for public humiliation. Some summers ago, my older brother Marc and I made the mistake of catching a train out of Paris on the last day of July. We had no inkling it was the eve of the "congés payés," or paid holidays, when tout Paris decamps for points south.

I had been standing in a packed corridor for six or seven hours when an elegant Frenchwoman emerged muttering from the bathroom, her hands dripping wet, her faith in an orderly Cartesian universe evidently shaken by "l'absence insupportable" of paper towels in the WC. With world-class sang-froid, the woman simply grabbed the nearest available fabric -- the white shirt front of a certain naive American teenager -- to dry her hands and complete her toilette.

Mere warm-up, sadly, for my ultimate mortification on the rails. My wife still won't let me talk about it publicly (burn this after reading), but she has never let me forget the excruciating climax of the cross-country honeymoon trip we took in 1979. It was a chill November night in Montana, and the fields outside our speeding train -- the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle -- were dusted with moonlight and snow. Swept away by the romantic clickety-clack of the moment, we were forming a more perfect union when the occupants of the next compartment -- a cheery, white-haired woman and her middle-aged son -- threw open the connecting door.

I'm still not sure what they were looking for -- a shortcut to the dining car, perhaps? -- but the shock on their faces told me it wasn't us.

The next morning, we ran into the woman outside our compartment. "It's so nice to meet you formally," she chirped, giving me no time to don my Frozen Stoic Face. "My name is Mrs. Valentine!"