In 1923, fresh from being fired by a newspaper, young E.B. White, who would go on to write such classics as Charlotte's Web and Elements of Style, managed to scrape together enough money to book passage on a ship to Alaska. His shipmates were San Francisco Chamber of Commerce types who were uneasy trying to act like travelers at ease. White observed "the spectacle of Babbittry northbound-men visiting a strange land but craving not strangeness but a renewal of what was familiar."

It's a good phrase to describe most of the travelers featured in Wish You Weren't Here. With its wayfarer horror stories, it just may do for the travel industry what the roller coaster on Space Mountain did to that undercooked hot dog you inhaled.

Misbehaving children on airplanes, fleecing car-rental personnel, antagonistic toilet attendants, hungry grizzlies in nearby bushes, incompetent passport-office bureaucrats, disagreeable traveling companions who thought it was a good idea to pack pies in a suitcase, fellow tourists obsessed with anti-flatulence strategies, hotels with closets the size of children's coffins, bedding that feels like "the rough grope of a lust-fogged drunk" and a host of other nightmares come together in this inventory of travel and vacation misadventures.

Wish You Weren't Here is a collection of 21 stories that redefine the term "bad trip." It features funny tales by writers in top form: Christopher Buckley, Mark Twain, Pico Iyer, Tony Horwitz and others. Their babes-in-the- woods travails are the reader's schadenfreude. Reading about how someone else's vacation imploded is good for endless - or at least 336 pages - of amusement.

Is it funny to try to smuggle a dog aboard a cruise ship? Yes. Is it funny to try to duplicate the expedition of Lewis and Clark if you have absolutely no woodsman skills? Of course.

But these stories have more in common than sheer humor. You can't read them without concluding that ethnocentrism is alive and well - and perhaps a universal human attribute. To paraphrase Mark Twain, nothing so needs reforming as other people's countries.

This attitude seems particularly true of the American writers. Most of the stories penned by Americans carry the subtext that the rest of the world just doesn't live up to our standards - whether it's Bill Bryson recounting the tale of a Parisian baker trying to fulfill his bread order with a dead beaver, or Tom Miller bemoaning the white- knuckled state of South American bus transportation.

That's not to say that Wish You Weren't Here is a catalog of complaints. There's a lot more to laugh about than to cry about here.

Near the top of my list is P.J. O'Rourke's Weird Karma,which uses a keen eye and a wild mind to chronicle a drive across India.

"Life is jammed tight in India . . ." he writes. "Every inch of land is put to purpose. At the bottom of a 40-foot-deep abandoned well, which would be good for nothing but teenage suicides in America, somebody was raising frogs. Public restrooms in Calcutta employ the space-saving device of dispensing with walls and roofs and placing the urinal stalls on the sidewalk. No resource goes to waste, which sounds like a fine thing to advocate next Earth Day, except in the real world of poverty, it means that the principal household fuel of India is cow flop. This is formed into a circular patty and stuck on the side of the house, where it provides a solution to three problems: storage space, home décor and how to cook dinner."

Not all these stories take place outside the United States. Sara Vowell's Assassination Vacation, from the book of the same name, is, hands down, the funniest story about visiting presidential assassination sites ever written.

As Vowell treks everywhere from Buffalo, where William McKinley was killed, to Washington, D.C., where the sculptor of the Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial was obsessed with ceiling lights, she inevitably wonders about her mission:

"Somewhere on the road between museum displays of Lincoln's skull fragments and the ceramic tiles on which Garfield was gunned down and McKinley's bloodstained pj's it occurred to me that there is a name for travel embarked upon with the agenda of venerating relics: pilgrimage. The medieval pilgrimage routes, in which Christians walked from church to church to commune with the innards of saints, are the beginnings of the modern tourism industry. Which is to say that you can draw a more or less straight line from a Dark Ages peasant blistering his feet trudging to a church displaying the Virgin Mary's dried-up breast milk to me vomiting into a barf bag on a sightseeing boat headed toward the prison-island hell where some Lincoln assassination conspirators were locked up in 1865."

Colorado's link to presidential shootings (see John Hinckley) aren't included, but the Centennial State isn't overlooked in this compendium of woes. Mark Winegardner visits Estes Park in Elvis Presley Boulevard, taking time to sneer at our "rough hewn log affair" Welcome to Colorado signs. Not funny, pal.

I read most of Wish You Weren't Here on a flight to Orlando that was populated mostly by over-excited children and parents whose idea of discipline was to repeat, "Sit down, Bobby" two times per mile. Still, I concluded that I would probably never have the kind of trips I was reading about, and surely never have the kind of talent to write about them so well.

Bon voyage

• "Seats on these flights are unreserved, like being on a bus, or the casualty department of a hospital. The family, who are clearly in high spirits, having presumably given Social Services the slip earlier in the day, base themselves a few rows up to my right; the elder boy though, a nine-year-old sociopath, is banished down the aisle to sit with me."

- From Pete McCarthy's essay in Wish You Weren't Here.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.