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September 3, 2004/Elul 17 5763, Vol. 55, No. 50
Traveling for a living
JENNIFER GOLDBERG
Staff Writer
There are people in the world who get paid to take frequent trips to the most beautiful and exotic places on earth. Nice work if you can get it, right?
Robert Globerman of Phoenix spent eight years as a domestic and international tour leader, and his book "Bags Out at Seven" (Inkwell Productions, $17.50 paper-back) is a funny and touching look at a lifestyle most people can only dream of.
In the late 1980s, Glober-man was teaching art history at Marymount College in New York state and giv- ing occasional community lectures on related topics when he decided to organize his first tour - to Egypt. Despite a host of unforeseen complications (including a sick local guide, a perilous boat-boarding experience and shady luggage porters), he was hooked.
The book, which covers the highs and lows of trips to China, Boston and many places in between, appeals to everyone, says Globerman. "There really is almost no one who wouldn't be interested because the average person either wants to go to some other place, wants to travel, wants to learn about some place, or has been speaking to someone who has done it."
"Bags Out at Seven" is written in an easy, conver-sational style filled with loving descriptions of far-flung destinations, helpful travel tips and hilarious anecdotes about the best and worst of Globerman's many clients (these can be found in the chapter entitled "Clientele/Client Hell").
One memorable traveler, Estelle, "never wondered whether anyone else was talking; when she had a question, she simply pushed ahead and crowed her question in that unbearably strident whine," Globerman writes. "More than a couple of women told me they would push her off a cliff before the trip ended."
On another trip, a tour in Peru near the end of Glober-man's career as a tour leader, culminated in a trip to Machu Picchu.
He writes, "This was Feb-ruary, the rainy season, and the scene changed every time you looked around. Clouds formed and quickly moved. Rain came lightly and left. Blues turned grey and blue again. The colors of the stones changed from warm to cool. Huayna Picchu disappeared in mist as we looked at it."
As a Jew, Israel is one of Globerman's favorite places to visit. He has led several tours there ("Holy Land" tours with Christian travelers visiting Christian sites), but it is his personal visits to the country that are remain the most meaningful.
Globerman first visited Israel in 1960, and in the book, he writes that "a part of me remains there. ... I felt so much a part of it, some latent emotions from my Jewish heritage being touched by some indefinable chord."
On his first visit, he remembers, he met an American woman in his hotel lobby in the middle of the night.
She "asked if I had just arrived, and I said 'yes.' She wanted to know my feelings, and I said, 'I can't even explain it, I've never been here, I don't know anybody, and I'm overcome with this feeling that's just intangible.' And she said, 'Don't you know why? You've come home.' I got the goosebumps."
Although Globerman did his Israel travel before the current intifada and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks made visiting the country more risky, he would still recom-mend that Jews visit Israel.
"I'd go," he says. "The draw is much too great. But you have to know there is that danger. But there's danger here with terrorism, too."
Globerman stopped lead-ing tours in 1998, and in 2002 he and his wife Regina moved to Arizona to be with their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren.
The couple now has a new section of the country to explore, and they have taken many short trips around Arizona and to New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and California. They are also members of Temple Kol Ami in Scottsdale.
Globerman continues to write, and is working on a third book (his other book, "Say Uncle," is a fictional account of a young Jewish man looking for love in the mid-century Borscht Belt). He will also be signing "Bags Out at Seven" at two local events later this month.
After decades of adventure, Globerman he retains the love of travel that captured him as a boy.
"It's the old saying: 'you get sand in your shoes and you can't stop,'" he says.
Details
- What: "Bags Out at Seven" book signings with Robert Globerman
- When: 9 a.m.-noon Sunday, Sept. 19; and 6:30-8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 21
Where:
- Sept. 19: Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, 1100 E. Apache Blvd., Tempe
- Sept. 21: Author's Café, 4014 N. Goldwater Blvd., Suite 104, Scottsdale
- Cost: Free
- Call: Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, 480-994- 9244; Author's Café, 480-481-3998
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