“Had a bad trip?” asked the announcement for a reading at Mc-Nally Robinson Booksellers. The event, hosted by the RDR Books founder, Roger Rapoport, was based on the series of travel fiasco stories, “I Should Have Stayed Home,” that he publishes.

Mr. Rapoport got the idea for the series when he was at a gathering of travel writers in California. He realized that their travel mishap stories were not being published in travel guides.

At the reading, Mr. Rapoport, who was in town from Muskegon, Mich., told the audience two of his favorite travel disaster stories. One was about a man visiting Belgium who parked his car in a no parking zone and also blocked a trolley line. The man had received an unusual ticket, so he showed it to a lawyer who said the ticket amount is calculated by the perceived economic impact. Because he blocked possibly thousands of people, the ticket could cost him as much as $85,000. The lawyer got it dramatically lowered to about a few hundred dollars. (Mr. Rapoport later told the Knickerbocker that in Finland, speeding tickets can be pegged to one’s income level.)

Mr. Rapoport told a second of his favorite travel fiasco stories. A tourist en route from Europe to California had stopped in New York and was visiting Chinatown. At a restaurant that no longer exists, he complained that the lo mein was too crunchy. Something in the way he said it upset the waiter, who flipped the chair out from under the tourist.The waiter began to pummel him and another waiter pulled out a gun.

He then told the Knickerbocker about a traveler who boarded a cruise off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cruise ship stopped and returned to the port, where police watched as the cruise ship was stripped of ovens, refrigerators, beds, and so forth.It turned out that the cruise line had gone bankrupt. The traveler then realized why the price offered for the cruise had originally been such a good deal.

Other bad travel experiences? He said he knows someone who got into a rental car and drove off, but found it wasn’t his car. (The same key sometimes works in different cars, he said).

Mr. Rapoport then opened the evening to audience members to read or talk about their own ruined vacations or failed travel experiences. One of the series contributors, Mark Cerulli, read from “Air Sickness,”his account of a trip to Senegal that had infuriated him. There were glaring problems with everything from baggage mishaps to misrepresented travel tours. Next, an English travel writer, Maria del Carmen Clegg, described a bicycle trip she attempted in 2003 from Guatemala City to Mexico City in which she got the flu and bronchitis.Another travel writer told the story of a man who boarded a plane from Hawaii to Australia.When he awoke from sleep, he saw the moon was on the other side of the plane than he had remembered on such previous trips. The man informed the stewardess, who found the captain asleep and the plane headed in the wrong direction.

After the event, the Knickerbocker asked Mr. Rapoport to offer a tip to successful travel.He said one trick is to “under-schedule,” that is, not to try to plan something for every waking moment.

He also offered this wisdom: “Consistency in travel experience is not an accurate predictor of what’s going to happen the next time.” Mr. Rapoport said one year he enjoyed the fine beaches of Oahu, Hawaii.The next time he returned heavy rain and overflowing sewers closed the beaches.

Asked to relate a New York travel mishap, he described a story that a writer, Monica Holmes, had contributed. A woman travels down to Greenwich Village in a taxi with her sister.A limousine cuts them off, and the cab driver begins a high-speed chase after the limo. After the wild ride, the sisters pay the driver and the two get out. One girl then heads back to the cab. Why? “I forgot to tip him,” she said.

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VAN GOGH AT THE P.O. The famous are not immune from mishaps either. At a lecture last month on drawings and prints at the Morgan Library, associate curator Jennifer Tonkovich read from a letter that artist Vincent Van Gogh sent to fellow artist Émile Bernard in June 1888. Writing from Arles, Van Gogh began the concluding paragraph:

I must go and paint, so I’ll stop; I’ll probably write again soon. A thousand apologies for my not putting enough stamps on that letter, even though I stuck them on at the post office, nor is this the first time that it has happened here that, being in doubt and enquiring at the counter, I have been given the wrong information about the postage.

gshapiro@nysun.com