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It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne's Train Champs. Today it's traveling time.

Summer vacation season is rolling around and maybe you're busy making adventurous plans.

Travel writer Tony Perate has spent his career traveling all over the globe.

But he always chose exotic places like Tierra del Fuego or the Amazon over

predictable Paris or Rome until he discovered the oldest surviving guidebook. It's a second

century tour of Greece, and he decided to recreate the tour, following in the footsteps of the

ancients. He told Steve Paulson that travelling hasn't much changed

since the Romans invented tourism. Literature has a litany of complaints about in ancient times,

about their rock-hard mattresses and their linky roofs and the staff who are sullen and surly

and the innkeepers who are demented and at all these places you could also get food as

well there were little restaurants in all these inns and much like today people would complain

about the food there were always rumors of human flesh turning up in the stews and knuckle bones

and things like that and in fact the people who stayed in these inns as well there was plutarch

is always complaining about

the company that you would find yourself stuck with at night, and he actually advises that you

hum to yourself in the dining room to drown out the drivel of the other travelers.

So once you actually started to read about all of this stuff, you did something rather unusual.

You retraced the root of these ancient Roman tourists. So why did you want to do that?

I'd always loved ancient history, and I had studied Latin and Greek back in Australia, where I was brought up,

and I had actually intended to go naturally to see the great sites of Italy and Greece and Asia Minor and Egypt.

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