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Ticket to paradise?

Endless vacation touted in 'A Travel Guide to Heaven'

Published September 26, 2003 at midnight

So you're thinking maybe Disney World or Hawaii for your next vacation? Or, for a big-city adventure, New York, Paris or even Rome?

Hey, why settle for one, when you can book a trip to heaven and have them all? As Anthony DeStefano contends: "It's Disney World, Hawaii, Paris, Rome and New York all rolled up into one."

In what may be the weirdest book we've seen in the last, say, infinity, DeStefano has written A Travel Guide to Heaven (Doubleday, $18.95), a book that purports to describe the land from which no one has returned.

DeStefano, though, seems to know all about it.

Like the best resorts in Maui, he writes, heaven will have great food, ("Do you think you've tasted some good food in your life? Well, wait until you taste the food in heaven!"); awesome music ("and I guarantee you it won't be just choirs singing and harps playing"); and jaw-dropping scenery ("If anything, Technicolor is the least that heaven is going to be.")

Heaven will also have a vast city with an amazing skyline, including, quite possibly, the World Trade Center, restored to its finest.

Need we say more?

If you haven't already called your travel agent, then we know what you're thinking: Who is this loony tunes (one who has managed, by the way, to round up blurbs from the likes of Lee Iacocca, Regis Philbin and Susan Lucci)?

According to press material, DeStefano is the CEO of Priests for Life, a Catholic nonprofit organization based in New York. More to the point, he says his ideas are based on the teachings of the Bible and Christian theology. He's drawn much of his inferences straight from the scriptures - and even footnotes them.

Skeptics will probably be booking the first flight to Hilton Head, scrap this heaven thing. But then again, DeStefano reminds us that a vacation upstairs offers something the finest resorts here on Earth cannot: "It's forever. Heaven truly is the vacation that never ends."

Now, will that be first class or coach?



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