STRANGE BUT TRUE THE WEIRD HISTORY OF VACATIONS

Before vacations came with poolside drinks, they came with freezing seawater, twelve trunks, and a doctor insisting this was good for you.

Getting away has always been a little ridiculous.

Wealthy young travelers once spent years touring Europe with servants and enough luggage to furnish a small hotel. Seaside visitors climbed into wooden bathing machines to enter the ocean without causing a scandal. City dwellers paid ranchers for the privilege of doing chores. And somebody looked at an enormous elephant and thought, “That should be a building.”

STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE WEIRD HISTORY OF VACATIONS takes you on a funny, surprising journey through the strange inventions, ambitious schemes, and questionable decisions that turned time away from work into a worldwide obsession.

Discover how a train trip organized around staying sober helped launch the package holiday, why Coney Island visitors paid to see premature babies in incubators, and what happened when Henry Ford and Thomas Edison went camping with considerably more assistance than the average family. Explore holiday camps, honeymoon hotspots, early motorhomes, roadside tourist traps, floating palaces, and timeshares that made buying a little piece of paradise sound suspiciously simple.

Along the way, meet the dreamers, salesmen, showmen, and exhausted parents who helped invent the modern getaway.

Packed with bizarre history and cheeky humor, this is a book for curious travelers, armchair adventurers, and anyone who has ever returned home needing a vacation from their vacation.

Pack your curiosity. Leave the twelve trunks.