Get both of Catherine Ryan Howard's bestselling travel memoirs, Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida and Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America, in this special combination e-book title.
MOUSETRAPPED: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida_______________________________________ Three big dreams, two Mouse Ears and one J-1 visa. What could possibly go wrong in the happiest place on earth? When Catherine Ryan Howard decides to swap the grey clouds of Ireland for the clear skies of the Sunshine State, she thinks all of her dreams--working in a hotel in Walt Disney World, living in the United States, seeing a Space Shuttle launch--are about to come true. Ahead of her she sees weekends at the beach, mornings by the pool and an inexplicably skinnier version of herself skipping around Magic Kingdom.
But not long into her first day on Disney soil--and not long after a breakfast of Mickey-shaped pancakes--Catherine's Disney bubble bursts. Soon it seems that among Orlando's baked highways, monotonous mall clusters and world famous theme-parks, pixie dust is hard to find and hair is downright impossible to straighten.
The only memoir about working in Walt Disney World, Space Shuttle launches, the town that Disney built, religious theme parks, Bruce Willis, humidity-challenged hair and the Ebola virus, Mousetrapped is the story of what happened when one Irish girl went searching for happiness in the happiest place on earth.
BACKPACKED: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America_______________________________________
Catherine prefers bath robes to bed bugs, lattes to lizards and mini-bars to malaria. So why is she going backpacking?
Catherine Ryan Howard isn't the backpacking type. Working for one of the world's biggest hotel chains, she and her employee discount have become accustomed to complimentary bath robes, 24-hour room service and Egyptian cotton sheets. As for holidays, Catherine likes places that encourage lying - lying on the beach, lying by the pool, lying in bed...
She's been on what feels like one long holiday in Florida when her fearless best friend, Sheelagh, announces plans to backpack across Central America. With Catherine's US visa about to expire, her having no desire to return home to Ireland just yet and her common sense, evidently, on a day off, she agrees to go along.
After all, how bad can this backpacking thing be?
Um... very bad, actually. Catherine soon finds herself showering with the threat of electrocution, living with mutant cockroaches, sleeping on wooden planks, suffering from all but one of the side-effects listed on her bottle of anti-malarial tablets (liver failure, in case you were wondering) and riding a horse up the side of a smoking, lava-filled volcano known for its unpredictable eruptions and bandit activity.
And that's just the first week.
Backpacked is the wry tale of what happened when one very reluctant backpacker hit the backpacker trail and discovered that beyond the mosquitoes, bad coffee and flea-infested hostels lie even bigger mosquitoes, even worse coffee and flea-infested hostels whose bathrooms have no doors.
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