Twitchhiker (eBook)

How One Man Travelled the World by Twitter

Paul Smith (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2010 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Summersdale Publishers Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-84839-365-3 (ISBN)

Infos

There were five rules of Twitchhiker: * I can only accept offers of travel and accommodation from people on Twitter. * I can't make any travel plans further than three days in advance. * I can only spend money on food, drink and anything that might fit in my suitcase. * If there is more than one offer, I choose which I take. If there is only one,I have to take it within 48 hours. * If I am unable to find a way to move on from a location within 48 hours, the challenge is over and I go home. Bored in the bread aisle of the supermarket one day, Paul Smith wondered how far he could get around the world in 30 days through the goodwill of users of social networking site Twitter. At the mercy of these rules, he set his sights on New Zealand - the opposite point on the planet to his home in Newcastle. All he had to do next was explain the idea to his new wife. In an adventure wrapped in nonsense and cocooned in daft, he travelled by road, boat, plane and train, slept in five-star luxury and on no-star floors, shmoozed with Hollywood A-listers and was humbled by the generosity of the thousands who followed his journey and determined its course.

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There were five rules of Twitchhiker: I can only accept offers of travel and accommodation from people on Twitter. I can't make any travel plans further than three days in advance. I can only spend money on food, drink and anything that might fit in my suitcase. If there is more than one offer, I choose which I take. If there is only one, I have to take it within 48 hours. If I am unable to find a way to move on from a location within 4 hours, the challenge is over and I go home.Bored in the bread aisle of the supermarket one day, Paul Smith wondered how far he could get around the world in 30 days through the goodwill of users of social networking site Twitter. At the mercy of these rules, he set his sights on New Zealand - the opposite point on the planet to his home in Newcastle. All he had to do next was explain the idea to his new wife.In an adventure wrapped in nonsense and cocooned in daft, he travelled by road, boat, plane and train, slept in five-star luxury and on no-star floors, shmoozed with Hollywood A-listers and was humbled by the generosity of the thousands who followed his journey and determined its course.

Textauszug

It was quiet and still, the very dead of night when the dead themselves might consider turning in, and I had no business being awake. I'd deprived my body of a full night's sleep for a fortnight, occasionally through choice but mostly through circumstance. This time, however, I was of the unshakeable belief that the blame rested squarely with the mattress. Despite the name, a folding bed shares few genes with its everyday equivalent, even when it's one provided by a Hilton hotel. Such mattresses are more a bucketful of rusty, tired springs thrown into a sack of damp dust. One spring in particular was attempting to puncture my torso, but I denied the wicked implement its blood-letting and instead sat up to peek through the curtains. Like any city centre in the pre-dawn hours, Austin was motionless, save for the occasional flicker of headlights straying between the building blocks. The Texan capital gazed back at the twelfth floor of the Hilton and recoiled in horror at the haggard bald head at the window. 'Nearly time to get up, mate.' The voice belonged to the previously unmentioned Norwegian gentleman in the room. He was also in bed, not mine, but a real bed several feet away, with its real pillows and real mattress, plump with goose feathers and unicorn hair and kittens. There was still time to kill him and claim it. I thumbed at my mobile phone, the display momentarily blinded me. Half past five, it blared. No point resorting to murder and spoiling the sheets when we were due to receive a phone call any minute. And we did. 'Hi Paul,' said a man called Syd, a television producer. 'Good night's sleep?' 'Yes,' I lied. 'Awesome. We're just about set up for you down here.' 'We're nearly ready,' I lied again, standing in full view of Austin with my left testicle hanging out of my boxer shorts. 'We'll see you shortly.' A hot shower massaged out the knot between my shoulders but did little to soothe the one in my stomach. I rooted through my bag for a set of clothes that didn't look like they'd been stuffed in a wrestler's thong for a week, and pulled out a red T-shirt I'd promised to wear for the occasion. The socks had been worn for only two consecutive days and so were reasonably fresh, and a woman called Cindy had donated a three-pack of boxer shorts in a Wichita car park two days earlier. Choosing what pair of trousers to wear was even less problematic, since one of the three pairs I'd packed was some 1,600 kilometres distant in a Chicago hotel, possibly still in the wardrobe where I'd hung them five days before. 'Come on then,' said Matt, the previously unnamed Norwegian gentleman with his previously unmentioned Cheshire accent. 'Let's see you make a daft sod of yourself for the camera.' The first time Matt and I met was in the very same hotel, twenty-four hours earlier. I'd agreed to bed down in his room barely twelve hours before that. We'd been perfect strangers less than two days ago, yet there we were accompanying one another along silent corridors to the elevator, where we descended to the ground floor and tiptoed through reception to the lobby bar. The previous evening's drunken roars from twenty-somethings in ironic T-shirts were replaced by the sound of a three-man production crew tearing duct tape to secure snakes of cable across the floor. A light stronger than the Texan sun singled out a chair in the centre of the room. Syd the producer gestured to me to sit down and stare into the light, while I sneaked a mic and an earpiece under my T-shirt to my neckline.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.8.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseberichte
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Web / Internet
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Privatrecht / Bürgerliches Recht ► IT-Recht
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 1-84839-365-2 / 1848393652
• ISBN-13: 978-1-84839-365-3 / 9781848393653