Diary of a Pilgrimage

Jerome K. Jerome takes his particular talent for disaster on the road in this account of a pilgrimage to see the famous Oberammergau Passion Play. Setting out from London with a friend, he navigates a gauntlet of continental calamities: brutal Channel crossings, grotesque hotel beds that seem designed by sadists, trains that arrive when they please, and guidebooks so useless they might as well be fiction. The real spectacle isn't the play at all but the endless parade of cultural collisions and linguistic befuddlement. Through Cologne and Munich, into the Bavarian mountains and back via Heidelberg, nothing goes right and everything is hilarious. Like Three Men in a Boat transposed to foreign shores, this is the particular pleasure of watching an eminently reasonable man gradually driven to comic despair by a world configured to thwart him. For anyone who has ever traveled abroad and found that the journey was infinitely more entertaining than the destination.