Travel Tales: Getting Away with It — or Almost! is about travelers who perpetrate their own schemes on fellow travelers or even the locals themselves. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they do not.

This book collects some extraordinarily funny situations travelers sometimes get themselves into that they would not normally do at home. This book includes tales of what they try to get away with while free of the controls of their normal daily lives at home. When traveling, you often strive to be all you can be, good or bad, and sometimes rightly or wrongly so. You behave, after all, often just to see if you can do it—if you can get away with it! You play roles you would never dream of doing back at home. You might try foods or drinks you would never think of eating at home. Or you might steal ashtrays, bathrobes, hotel keys, and even license plates as souvenirs that would never do otherwise. You might try to get into places without paying. You might pretend to be someone you are not, like crashing a party given by a famous movie star in Rome. You might try to sneak around the Paris Metro without paying, not because you do not have the money, but because you just want to see if you can do it. Some things people get away with are silly, funny, mischievous, or ridiculous even. One man, for instance, poured bubble bath in the Trafalgar Fountain in London flooding the square with soap bubbles!

Travel is often a time to test yourself, to see what you are made of. Oh, we all get away with some harmless silly things that hurt no one. And to some extent, that is who we are. We travel, we grow up, we mature. Our getting away with some things that we may not be all that proud of is a part of the process of growing up and learning what we should avoid doing in the first place or at least grow out of.