We Are Experiencing A Slight Delay

When has a trip ever turned out exactly the way you imagined—and wasn’t the best part the messy, funny, human things that ambushed you along the way? In We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay, Gary Janetti argues that travel isn’t about bucket lists or wellness hacks; it’s about recognizing yourself in motion. He contends that the way you eat, pack, pick tables, complain about foghorns, and fall asleep on a stranger’s shoulder reveals your truest preferences—and that the richest souvenirs are the stories you bring home. But to see yourself clearly, you have to be honest about snobbery, desire, disappointment, and joy.

Across essays that range from a caffeine-free hiking retreat in an Italian hill town to a thwarted double-birthday on the Pacific aboard the QE2, Janetti braids barbed humor with soft-hearted observation. He admits to obsessive research (he will cross-reference your Rome restaurant with Eater, Bon Appétit, and three concierges), refuses to check luggage on principle, and tells you why you should never accept a rich person’s “Stay with us!” Yet beneath the arch tone is a tenderness for partners, parents, servers, bellmen, and the fellow traveler seated two rows behind you humming “America” from West Side Story in a cruise revue. Travel is the stage that lets him stage-whisper truths about class, taste, manners, and love.

What the Book Really Says (Under the Jokes)

Janetti’s core claim is simple: you don’t go away to become someone new; you go to remember who you are. On a supposedly purifying wellness week outside Rome, he discovers that he wants espresso more than affirmation and that he loves his husband Brad—who speeds ahead on the hikes—but most of all loves hearing Brad laugh somewhere up the trail. On a rain-plagued Queen Mary 2 cruise where his cabin sits atop a piano bar and under a foghorn that blasts every two minutes, he vows not to be petty, fails magnificently, and then surprises himself with gratitude for the tiny mercies (Vincenza at the pier moving his 92-year-old father past an impossible line; a perfect banana daiquiri; big-band night that turns octogenarians thirty again). His theme: expectation collides with reality, and the spark that flies off that collision is meaning.

Tastes, Tables, and the Class System in Your Head

Throughout, taste is a moral education. He learned hierarchy early on Cunard’s QE2—Queens Grill vs. Britannia—then met a preening NYU kid in the Queens Grill who mockingly cracked a cake in the empty kitchen, awakening in young Gary both resentment and hunger for more. Years later he trains his partner into a co-conspirator: together they can spot the “right restaurant” in Rome, leave the wrong table by telepathy, and share the illicit thrill of hating what everyone else loves. He’s also the rare humorist willing to teach you how to eat alone at a table—as opposed to hiding at the bar—because claiming your own table in public is a tiny, defiant work of selfhood (think Nora Ephron’s appetite meets David Sedaris’s prickly candor).

The Travel Operating System

Practical rules surface everywhere. Pack for three days, use wash-and-fold, never check a bag; bring a book to dinner; always ask for the upgrade; tip housekeeping daily with a note. If you must taste luxury on a budget, do one night at the Four Seasons and milk two full days of pool, beach, and breakfast (his delicious “two-days-for-one-night” hack). Above all, stay in hotels, not as a guest in someone’s home—especially not a rich person’s—unless you’re willing to perform as their on-demand entertainer (Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel muses about anticipation and place; Janetti adds the etiquette and theater).

Love Is the Throughline

This is a love story disguised as a travel book. Janetti met Brad on Mykonos—he still remembers the alley, the dessert spoon, the name “Brad” lighting him like a Christmas tree—and the book keeps swiveling back to the ways that shared taste becomes a marriage. Hearing Brad laugh ahead on a brutal hike, dancing with his sister Maria while Brad leads her through a swing on the QM2, or seeing a London long-stay hotel shift from dream to suffocation—all of it points to the paradox: place changes you, but your person orients you.

Why This Matters for You

If you travel—or simply aspire to live with more taste and fewer apologies—Janetti gives you permission to name what you actually like (a well-done burger, a quiet cabin, the right table), ditch what you don’t (group hikes, forced hospitality, cruise revues with tap shoes that don’t tap), and then laugh when the universe sends fog instead of views. You’ll see how class and status seep into your plans, how expectations booby-trap vacations, how small graces redeem big snafus, and how a good partner—or a kind stranger named Betty who’s 94 and lost on a ship—can turn a day. The book is part etiquette, part memoir, part stand-up set, and all heart.

Big Idea

Travel doesn’t fix you; it clarifies you. The more honest you are about what delights and infuriates you, the more likely a trip will give you the only upgrade that matters: stories worth retelling.

In the pages ahead, you’ll see how he wrestles with wellness culture, how he curates restaurants with surgical precision, how he revisits the class markers of his youth, how expectation vs. reality creates comedy and connection, and how love, family, and aging shape the journeys that actually count.

When has a trip ever turned out exactly the way you imagined—and wasn’t the best part the messy, funny, human things that ambushed you along the way? In We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay, Gary Janetti argues that travel isn’t about bucket lists or wellness hacks; it’s about recognizing yourself in motion. He contends that the way you eat, pack, pick tables, complain about foghorns, and fall asleep on a stranger’s shoulder reveals your truest preferences—and that the richest souvenirs are the stories you bring home. But to see yourself clearly, you have to be honest about snobbery, desire, disappointment, and joy.

Across essays that range from a caffeine-free hiking retreat in an Italian hill town to a thwarted double-birthday on the Pacific aboard the QE2, Janetti braids barbed humor with soft-hearted observation. He admits to obsessive research (he will cross-reference your Rome restaurant with Eater, Bon Appétit, and three concierges), refuses to check luggage on principle, and tells you why you should never accept a rich person’s “Stay with us!” Yet beneath the arch tone is a tenderness for partners, parents, servers, bellmen, and the fellow traveler seated two rows behind you humming “America” from West Side Story in a cruise revue. Travel is the stage that lets him stage-whisper truths about class, taste, manners, and love.

What the Book Really Says (Under the Jokes)

Janetti’s core claim is simple: you don’t go away to become someone new; you go to remember who you are. On a supposedly purifying wellness week outside Rome, he discovers that he wants espresso more than affirmation and that he loves his husband Brad—who speeds ahead on the hikes—but most of all loves hearing Brad laugh somewhere up the trail. On a rain-plagued Queen Mary 2 cruise where his cabin sits atop a piano bar and under a foghorn that blasts every two minutes, he vows not to be petty, fails magnificently, and then surprises himself with gratitude for the tiny mercies (Vincenza at the pier moving his 92-year-old father past an impossible line; a perfect banana daiquiri; big-band night that turns octogenarians thirty again). His theme: expectation collides with reality, and the spark that flies off that collision is meaning.

Tastes, Tables, and the Class System in Your Head

Throughout, taste is a moral education. He learned hierarchy early on Cunard’s QE2—Queens Grill vs. Britannia—then met a preening NYU kid in the Queens Grill who mockingly cracked a cake in the empty kitchen, awakening in young Gary both resentment and hunger for more. Years later he trains his partner into a co-conspirator: together they can spot the “right restaurant” in Rome, leave the wrong table by telepathy, and share the illicit thrill of hating what everyone else loves. He’s also the rare humorist willing to teach you how to eat alone at a table—as opposed to hiding at the bar—because claiming your own table in public is a tiny, defiant work of selfhood (think Nora Ephron’s appetite meets David Sedaris’s prickly candor).

The Travel Operating System

Practical rules surface everywhere. Pack for three days, use wash-and-fold, never check a bag; bring a book to dinner; always ask for the upgrade; tip housekeeping daily with a note. If you must taste luxury on a budget, do one night at the Four Seasons and milk two full days of pool, beach, and breakfast (his delicious “two-days-for-one-night” hack). Above all, stay in hotels, not as a guest in someone’s home—especially not a rich person’s—unless you’re willing to perform as their on-demand entertainer (Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel muses about anticipation and place; Janetti adds the etiquette and theater).

Love Is the Throughline

This is a love story disguised as a travel book. Janetti met Brad on Mykonos—he still remembers the alley, the dessert spoon, the name “Brad” lighting him like a Christmas tree—and the book keeps swiveling back to the ways that shared taste becomes a marriage. Hearing Brad laugh ahead on a brutal hike, dancing with his sister Maria while Brad leads her through a swing on the QM2, or seeing a London long-stay hotel shift from dream to suffocation—all of it points to the paradox: place changes you, but your person orients you.

Why This Matters for You

If you travel—or simply aspire to live with more taste and fewer apologies—Janetti gives you permission to name what you actually like (a well-done burger, a quiet cabin, the right table), ditch what you don’t (group hikes, forced hospitality, cruise revues with tap shoes that don’t tap), and then laugh when the universe sends fog instead of views. You’ll see how class and status seep into your plans, how expectations booby-trap vacations, how small graces redeem big snafus, and how a good partner—or a kind stranger named Betty who’s 94 and lost on a ship—can turn a day. The book is part etiquette, part memoir, part stand-up set, and all heart.

Big Idea

Travel doesn’t fix you; it clarifies you. The more honest you are about what delights and infuriates you, the more likely a trip will give you the only upgrade that matters: stories worth retelling.

In the pages ahead, you’ll see how he wrestles with wellness culture, how he curates restaurants with surgical precision, how he revisits the class markers of his youth, how expectation vs. reality creates comedy and connection, and how love, family, and aging shape the journeys that actually count.

Janetti opens with “Wellness,” a wicked send-up of the industry and a vulnerable exploration of control. He says straight out: he’s not anti-wellness; he’s anti-earnestness, the self-congratulatory cult of busyness that often cloaks it. So when his husband Brad suggests a caffeine- and alcohol-free, plant-based retreat outside Rome—four-hour hikes, moisture-wicking everything, and an early wake-up call—he shocks himself by saying yes. Why? Because it’s Italy. Because the promise of a terrace, a view, and a future bowl of pasta can make a person do strange things.

A Plan Built on Pleasure, Then Pain

He devises a pre-retreat bender: three days in Rome for espresso, wine (for him—Brad’s sober), carbs, and gelato. He researches restaurants like a litigator preparing for trial—Tripadvisor, Eater, Bon Appétit, concierges, friends—then cross-references them again and again until the “right” tables click into place. The days blur into capitol-B Bliss. Then they drive to the hill town full of cafés they’re forbidden to enter, like Chippendales on a clothes-on night.

The first hike breaks him. At 5:30 a.m., a chirpy wake-up call; by mid-morning he’s convinced he will die alone between orange flag markers, the front runners (including ex-military and Brad) vanished. He refuses an apple break because stopping would concede defeat to the woman with a heart condition a few paces behind. He drinks through the hydration bladder like a soldier in a war movie. He mutters, “So much fun,” to no one.

The Moment He Could Have Quit

Everything in his operating system says to bail. He and Brad even plot an impossible escape to Capri and Portofino at night on their phones. But the next morning, he laces his taped knees and goes again. Something shifts. The group he feared—twelve strangers—turns out to be kind, funny, encouraging. Dinners stretch into real conversation. He and Brad don’t sit together.

The day he can hear Brad’s laugh echoing up the trail is the day the essay reveals its heart. He may be alone between flags, but the laughter orients him. The final, hardest hike ends on grass, apples in hand, together. He hasn’t become a wellness person; he’s become himself—someone who can do hard things, still prefer coffee, and love the sound of his partner’s joy.

What This Teaches You

You don’t have to like the script to learn from the scene. Janetti’s satire (eye contact that drills through your skull, the tyranny of “reset”) masks a practical map: allow one indulgence that makes the deprivation survivable; over-prepare what you can control (restaurants, rooms, views); then surrender to the parts you can’t—tempo, terrain, other people. His “non-wellness is my wellness” line isn’t posturing; it’s permission to calibrate your own dial.

(Compare to Pico Iyer in The Art of Stillness. Iyer recommends subtraction; Janetti adds that, for some of us, subtraction lands only if it’s prefaced by an espresso and followed by a story worth telling.)

A Checklist for Your Next “Wellness” Anything

• Front-load joy. Three days of carbs can fuel seven days of chickpea frittatas.
• Dress for the role, but mock it privately. Moisture-wicking is fine; wicking your personality is not.
• Accept solo stretches, but listen for your person’s laugh. It’s your north star.
• Let strangers surprise you. Shared misery is the glue of temporary community.

Bottom Line

Control gets you to the trailhead; relinquishment gets you to the view. The trick is knowing which to apply when.

Janetti opens with “Wellness,” a wicked send-up of the industry and a vulnerable exploration of control. He says straight out: he’s not anti-wellness; he’s anti-earnestness, the self-congratulatory cult of busyness that often cloaks it. So when his husband Brad suggests a caffeine- and alcohol-free, plant-based retreat outside Rome—four-hour hikes, moisture-wicking everything, and an early wake-up call—he shocks himself by saying yes. Why? Because it’s Italy. Because the promise of a terrace, a view, and a future bowl of pasta can make a person do strange things.

A Plan Built on Pleasure, Then Pain

He devises a pre-retreat bender: three days in Rome for espresso, wine (for him—Brad’s sober), carbs, and gelato. He researches restaurants like a litigator preparing for trial—Tripadvisor, Eater, Bon Appétit, concierges, friends—then cross-references them again and again until the “right” tables click into place. The days blur into capitol-B Bliss. Then they drive to the hill town full of cafés they’re forbidden to enter, like Chippendales on a clothes-on night.

The first hike breaks him. At 5:30 a.m., a chirpy wake-up call; by mid-morning he’s convinced he will die alone between orange flag markers, the front runners (including ex-military and Brad) vanished. He refuses an apple break because stopping would concede defeat to the woman with a heart condition a few paces behind. He drinks through the hydration bladder like a soldier in a war movie. He mutters, “So much fun,” to no one.

The Moment He Could Have Quit

Everything in his operating system says to bail. He and Brad even plot an impossible escape to Capri and Portofino at night on their phones. But the next morning, he laces his taped knees and goes again. Something shifts. The group he feared—twelve strangers—turns out to be kind, funny, encouraging. Dinners stretch into real conversation. He and Brad don’t sit together.

The day he can hear Brad’s laugh echoing up the trail is the day the essay reveals its heart. He may be alone between flags, but the laughter orients him. The final, hardest hike ends on grass, apples in hand, together. He hasn’t become a wellness person; he’s become himself—someone who can do hard things, still prefer coffee, and love the sound of his partner’s joy.

What This Teaches You

You don’t have to like the script to learn from the scene. Janetti’s satire (eye contact that drills through your skull, the tyranny of “reset”) masks a practical map: allow one indulgence that makes the deprivation survivable; over-prepare what you can control (restaurants, rooms, views); then surrender to the parts you can’t—tempo, terrain, other people. His “non-wellness is my wellness” line isn’t posturing; it’s permission to calibrate your own dial.

(Compare to Pico Iyer in The Art of Stillness. Iyer recommends subtraction; Janetti adds that, for some of us, subtraction lands only if it’s prefaced by an espresso and followed by a story worth telling.)

A Checklist for Your Next “Wellness” Anything

• Front-load joy. Three days of carbs can fuel seven days of chickpea frittatas.
• Dress for the role, but mock it privately. Moisture-wicking is fine; wicking your personality is not.
• Accept solo stretches, but listen for your person’s laugh. It’s your north star.
• Let strangers surprise you. Shared misery is the glue of temporary community.

Bottom Line

Control gets you to the trailhead; relinquishment gets you to the view. The trick is knowing which to apply when.

More than flights or museums, the table is Janetti’s altar. He believes the “right restaurant” is not the trendiest or priciest; it’s the one whose vibe, table, and dish constellation matches who you are that day. He spends hours cross-referencing tips for Rome because, to him, one perfect plate can redeem jet lag and tyranny of lines. He has also trained Brad into a telepathic co-evaluator; one look and they’re both putting coats back on, headed for the exit. The ultimate marital flex is when Brad now occasionally beats him to the punch: “Come on, let’s go.”

The “Right Restaurant” Algorithm

Janetti never fully defines the algorithm—because that’s the point. Taste is a composite of room temperature, host’s warmth, the view from your seat, where the bathroom door is, the way the table wobbles, whether the ooh-ahh pasta yields to a hush the moment the main arrives. In Rome, the highest-rated spot turns out to be their least favorite. The joy is in whispering to your co-conspirator, “Eater can go [expletive] itself,” and knowing you’re not crazy.

He’s not a snob about price; he’s a snob about fit. He’d pick a plate of lentils at Chez André in Paris and roast chicken at J. Sheekey in London over a tasting-menu trophy. His “Favorites” chapter doubles as a city-by-city map of places that feel like themselves (Claridge’s for tea in the main room only, the Gritti deck on the Grand Canal where you don’t need to leave the hotel). The thread: authenticity and manageability over spectacle.

How to Eat Alone Like You Mean It

In “How to Eat Alone at a Restaurant,” he confesses that high school lunches were spent with Stephen King in the library and a pack of cookies. The counter was his transitional object as an adult—plausibly waiting for someone, happily anonymous. But graduating to a table-for-one is, in his taxonomy, “fucking.” Once you sit there, you’re declaring you require no witness to justify your evening.

He demystifies the move: bring a book or your phone (heavy petting), then try nothing (the act). Expect some diners to pity-glance; resist rewarding them. Treat it like a hotel room: more surface area to spread out. Revel in orders unconstrained by the fiction of “we’ll split a dessert.” Occasionally, you’ll feel the ghost of the library. That’s okay. You can love solitude and still get ambushed by old loneliness.

(Context: Laurie Colwin wrote about domestic coziness in Home Cooking; Janetti pushes the lens outward to public coziness—how to occupy space without apology.)

Rules of the Dining Road

• Table selection is a sport. Change tables if the first one is wrong. You’re paying to enjoy yourself.
• Signal your boundaries. Two-word, dead-eyed “good morning,” ear pods in, ends airplane seatmate chit-chat before it begins.
• Be gentle when friends choose. Sometimes the point is the company, not the carbonara.

Takeaway

Curate your tables and your solitude with the same care. The “right” place is where your shoulders drop and your partner grins, not where the algorithm told you to go.

More than flights or museums, the table is Janetti’s altar. He believes the “right restaurant” is not the trendiest or priciest; it’s the one whose vibe, table, and dish constellation matches who you are that day. He spends hours cross-referencing tips for Rome because, to him, one perfect plate can redeem jet lag and tyranny of lines. He has also trained Brad into a telepathic co-evaluator; one look and they’re both putting coats back on, headed for the exit. The ultimate marital flex is when Brad now occasionally beats him to the punch: “Come on, let’s go.”

The “Right Restaurant” Algorithm

Janetti never fully defines the algorithm—because that’s the point. Taste is a composite of room temperature, host’s warmth, the view from your seat, where the bathroom door is, the way the table wobbles, whether the ooh-ahh pasta yields to a hush the moment the main arrives. In Rome, the highest-rated spot turns out to be their least favorite. The joy is in whispering to your co-conspirator, “Eater can go [expletive] itself,” and knowing you’re not crazy.

He’s not a snob about price; he’s a snob about fit. He’d pick a plate of lentils at Chez André in Paris and roast chicken at J. Sheekey in London over a tasting-menu trophy. His “Favorites” chapter doubles as a city-by-city map of places that feel like themselves (Claridge’s for tea in the main room only, the Gritti deck on the Grand Canal where you don’t need to leave the hotel). The thread: authenticity and manageability over spectacle.

How to Eat Alone Like You Mean It

In “How to Eat Alone at a Restaurant,” he confesses that high school lunches were spent with Stephen King in the library and a pack of cookies. The counter was his transitional object as an adult—plausibly waiting for someone, happily anonymous. But graduating to a table-for-one is, in his taxonomy, “fucking.” Once you sit there, you’re declaring you require no witness to justify your evening.

He demystifies the move: bring a book or your phone (heavy petting), then try nothing (the act). Expect some diners to pity-glance; resist rewarding them. Treat it like a hotel room: more surface area to spread out. Revel in orders unconstrained by the fiction of “we’ll split a dessert.” Occasionally, you’ll feel the ghost of the library. That’s okay. You can love solitude and still get ambushed by old loneliness.

(Context: Laurie Colwin wrote about domestic coziness in Home Cooking; Janetti pushes the lens outward to public coziness—how to occupy space without apology.)

Rules of the Dining Road

• Table selection is a sport. Change tables if the first one is wrong. You’re paying to enjoy yourself.
• Signal your boundaries. Two-word, dead-eyed “good morning,” ear pods in, ends airplane seatmate chit-chat before it begins.
• Be gentle when friends choose. Sometimes the point is the company, not the carbonara.

Takeaway

Curate your tables and your solitude with the same care. The “right” place is where your shoulders drop and your partner grins, not where the algorithm told you to go.

On Cunard’s QE2, class used to be literal: Queens Grill, Princess Grill, Columbia, Britannia. Little Gary, happily Britannia, wasn’t yearning for the roped-off Queens Grill—until a smug NYU acquaintance, a teenage Sebastian Flyte without charm, sneered at the masses and pilfered cake in the Queens Grill kitchen like a vandal. Shame followed by defiance by awakening: “You’re in the wrong goddamn restaurant, Mister.” That night is the origin story for Janetti’s lifelong calibration of taste and snobbery.

The Class System Sticks to You

The QE2 dining rooms taught him that rooms categorize people even before menus do. And once you’ve seen the rope and placard, you can’t unsee them. He holds two truths: he loves “the common folk” feeling of Britannia and he loathes being dismissed by someone who assumes carte blanche as their birthright. As an adult, his snobbery is often aesthetic, not fiscal: he wants a place to feel like itself, for the cheese aisle in Monoprix to be a museum and the museum café to be the prelude to Rodin.

He skewers rich-host hospitality with surgical precision in “I’ll Stay in a Hotel, Thanks.” A rich person who insists you must stay with them is testing your literacy in their unspoken rules. Accept, and you become their on-call entertainer, judged for every exit and lull (“I’m kidding!” they never are). Better to be a Radisson king of your keycard, free to be truly gracious because you can come and go. (This echoes Sloane Crosley’s observations about the social theater of favors.)

Public Taste vs. Private Longing

His class antennae also tune error-free to performance. On the QE2 world-cruise segment years later, he becomes an unpaid ringmaster at his Princess Grill table, ordering champagne nightly so a British mother-daughter duo will light up. He is good at it, too good—a captive of his own charm. When the ship crosses the International Date Line on his birthday (twice!), the prospect of reliving a day of forced specialness becomes unbearable. He disembarks in Osaka early, freeing himself from the role and finding the most exquisite relief: a quiet dinner alone, ruined only by a “Happy Birthday” sparkler he cannot blow out.

What This Gives You Language For

You’re allowed to want in (Queens Grill) and opt out (Osaka), to be a snob (fit) and a populist (Monoprix). You can insist on hotels because hosting dynamics distort friendship. You can love your ship and still bail on its dinner theater. Janetti’s gift is naming the dread you feel when you realize you’re someone’s content.

Line to Remember

“No rich person is a generous host. They are usually bored narcissists looking for a slight diversion.” You don’t have to test the rule to know if it applies; you can just book the hotel.

(Context: Paul Fussell’s Class maps the American status game; Janetti updates it for the cruise deck and the Instagram era, where the rope is invisible but palpable.)

On Cunard’s QE2, class used to be literal: Queens Grill, Princess Grill, Columbia, Britannia. Little Gary, happily Britannia, wasn’t yearning for the roped-off Queens Grill—until a smug NYU acquaintance, a teenage Sebastian Flyte without charm, sneered at the masses and pilfered cake in the Queens Grill kitchen like a vandal. Shame followed by defiance by awakening: “You’re in the wrong goddamn restaurant, Mister.” That night is the origin story for Janetti’s lifelong calibration of taste and snobbery.

The Class System Sticks to You

The QE2 dining rooms taught him that rooms categorize people even before menus do. And once you’ve seen the rope and placard, you can’t unsee them. He holds two truths: he loves “the common folk” feeling of Britannia and he loathes being dismissed by someone who assumes carte blanche as their birthright. As an adult, his snobbery is often aesthetic, not fiscal: he wants a place to feel like itself, for the cheese aisle in Monoprix to be a museum and the museum café to be the prelude to Rodin.

He skewers rich-host hospitality with surgical precision in “I’ll Stay in a Hotel, Thanks.” A rich person who insists you must stay with them is testing your literacy in their unspoken rules. Accept, and you become their on-call entertainer, judged for every exit and lull (“I’m kidding!” they never are). Better to be a Radisson king of your keycard, free to be truly gracious because you can come and go. (This echoes Sloane Crosley’s observations about the social theater of favors.)

Public Taste vs. Private Longing

His class antennae also tune error-free to performance. On the QE2 world-cruise segment years later, he becomes an unpaid ringmaster at his Princess Grill table, ordering champagne nightly so a British mother-daughter duo will light up. He is good at it, too good—a captive of his own charm. When the ship crosses the International Date Line on his birthday (twice!), the prospect of reliving a day of forced specialness becomes unbearable. He disembarks in Osaka early, freeing himself from the role and finding the most exquisite relief: a quiet dinner alone, ruined only by a “Happy Birthday” sparkler he cannot blow out.

What This Gives You Language For

You’re allowed to want in (Queens Grill) and opt out (Osaka), to be a snob (fit) and a populist (Monoprix). You can insist on hotels because hosting dynamics distort friendship. You can love your ship and still bail on its dinner theater. Janetti’s gift is naming the dread you feel when you realize you’re someone’s content.

Line to Remember

“No rich person is a generous host. They are usually bored narcissists looking for a slight diversion.” You don’t have to test the rule to know if it applies; you can just book the hotel.

(Context: Paul Fussell’s Class maps the American status game; Janetti updates it for the cruise deck and the Instagram era, where the rope is invisible but palpable.)

Janetti excels at the gap between brochure and lived experience. He boards the Orient Express in a tux, ready for alpine vistas and Agatha Christie intrigue, only to spend the night in formalwear parked opposite a McDonald’s and a KFC, waving at commuters like a penguin behind glass. He endures a Queen Mary 2 cabin situated directly over the piano lounge and directly beneath the foghorn—blasting every two minutes all night—while trying not to be petty. He goes to Noma’s Mexico pop-up for twenty courses of reverent foraging theater and realizes later he may have eaten ant larvae he mistook for corn. The moral isn’t bitterness; it’s alchemy.

When Things Go Sideways, Find the People

On the Orient Express, dissatisfaction becomes the great unmasker. He asks at dinner, “Did you think the train would stop this much?” and a collective exhale sweeps the car. Everyone had been pretending. Once the spell breaks, actual conversation blooms. They joke, they commiserate, they bond over the shared delusion. He leaves with less postcard footage and more human contact—which, in truth, is what endures.

On the QM2, when embarkation devolves into chaos and the average passenger age is “iron lung,” two kindnesses reframe the trip: Rebecca at Red Hook Tavern seats his family for an unplanned land dinner that becomes their best first-night meal; later, Vincenza from Cunard whisks his 92-year-old father through security with a wheelchair and the firm instruction, “Bring him to me right now.” He starts a gratitude litany—bartender Kay and the banana daiquiri, big-band night that time-machines old couples, a Baked Alaska on his 22nd anniversary with Brad—and the foghorn recedes into lore.

The Cult of the Tasting Menu (and Its Limits)

Noma Tulum is church: five-hour liturgy, servers in earth tones, monologues for every implement. He smiles so hard his face hurts. He eats so compliantly that his husband is shocked—until later, at home, he admits he probably preferred a burger and learns from Google that the “corn” was, in fact, ant larvae. He’s not mocking craft; he’s questioning whether reverence always equals pleasure. (Anthony Bourdain often made the same distinction: awe is not appetite.)

A Micro-Playbook for Disappointment

• Name the gap. Say out loud what everyone else is whispering; humor needs oxygen.
• Trade spectacle for connection. The best story may be the tablemates, not the view.
• Collect small wins. A good daiquiri, a well-done burger, a sister dancing to “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

Humor as Travel Insurance

If you can convert foghorns and KFC vistas into stories, you can’t really be robbed by a trip. The comedy is your refund.

Janetti excels at the gap between brochure and lived experience. He boards the Orient Express in a tux, ready for alpine vistas and Agatha Christie intrigue, only to spend the night in formalwear parked opposite a McDonald’s and a KFC, waving at commuters like a penguin behind glass. He endures a Queen Mary 2 cabin situated directly over the piano lounge and directly beneath the foghorn—blasting every two minutes all night—while trying not to be petty. He goes to Noma’s Mexico pop-up for twenty courses of reverent foraging theater and realizes later he may have eaten ant larvae he mistook for corn. The moral isn’t bitterness; it’s alchemy.

When Things Go Sideways, Find the People

On the Orient Express, dissatisfaction becomes the great unmasker. He asks at dinner, “Did you think the train would stop this much?” and a collective exhale sweeps the car. Everyone had been pretending. Once the spell breaks, actual conversation blooms. They joke, they commiserate, they bond over the shared delusion. He leaves with less postcard footage and more human contact—which, in truth, is what endures.

On the QM2, when embarkation devolves into chaos and the average passenger age is “iron lung,” two kindnesses reframe the trip: Rebecca at Red Hook Tavern seats his family for an unplanned land dinner that becomes their best first-night meal; later, Vincenza from Cunard whisks his 92-year-old father through security with a wheelchair and the firm instruction, “Bring him to me right now.” He starts a gratitude litany—bartender Kay and the banana daiquiri, big-band night that time-machines old couples, a Baked Alaska on his 22nd anniversary with Brad—and the foghorn recedes into lore.

The Cult of the Tasting Menu (and Its Limits)

Noma Tulum is church: five-hour liturgy, servers in earth tones, monologues for every implement. He smiles so hard his face hurts. He eats so compliantly that his husband is shocked—until later, at home, he admits he probably preferred a burger and learns from Google that the “corn” was, in fact, ant larvae. He’s not mocking craft; he’s questioning whether reverence always equals pleasure. (Anthony Bourdain often made the same distinction: awe is not appetite.)

A Micro-Playbook for Disappointment

• Name the gap. Say out loud what everyone else is whispering; humor needs oxygen.
• Trade spectacle for connection. The best story may be the tablemates, not the view.
• Collect small wins. A good daiquiri, a well-done burger, a sister dancing to “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

Humor as Travel Insurance

If you can convert foghorns and KFC vistas into stories, you can’t really be robbed by a trip. The comedy is your refund.

Under every itinerary is a love story. Janetti met Brad on Mykonos at thirty-five, offered him dessert at Niko’s Taverna, then kissed him on the dance floor thirty minutes later. He lied that he was thirty-two (fine), and Brad lied that he was a model in Athens (adorable). In the retelling, they tag-team the memories—Miu Miu boots, aloe vera, Patti LuPone’s “I Dreamed a Dream” at sunset—and you feel why they’ve returned to the same hotel, the Belvedere, ten-plus times. The island changed (100-euro sun beds, charm displaced), but the point stayed: “I’m so happy we’re back.”

Anniversaries, Foghorns, and Apples in the Grass

On their 22nd anniversary aboard the QM2, after a night of foghorn blasts that made sleep a myth, he records the moment that matters: “Every July 2… I’m taken back to that day… seeing Brad’s face for the first time as he walked down that winding path in Mykonos.” During the wellness retreat’s finale, the image is apples in a circle on grass: he arrives to Brad’s voice—“I knew you’d make it”—and sits down to eat, side by side. The bliss and the bickering (he will never forgive Brad for not waiting on that first hike) are the couple’s oxygen.

When the Dream Hotel Becomes Too Much

His long stay at London’s Covent Garden Hotel is a fantasy turned claustrophobia. For months he lives a stage-play guest life—“Are you joining us for tea?” “How was the theatre?”—until one Sunday the “good mornings” run out. He stops wanting to be touched by the place. Yet even here, love anchors him: the show (Vicious) is why he’s in London; “my dog, my husband, my bed, my home” are where he’s headed. When the scaffolding finally comes down after he’s left, he writes the hotel to say hello. The relationship can’t be what it was, but it can be remembered fondly.

Finding Your People at the Edge of the World

Touring Australia alone, he jitters with anxiety before two “evening-ish” stage shows in Melbourne, then discovers the country’s best coffee (sorry, Starbucks) and friend Gus, who becomes his “Aussie mate.” Mel from the Taronga Zoo takes him behind the scenes to meet koalas (he will never forget that it takes a week for a koala to… you know). In Sydney, he does the Harbor Bridge climb despite a terror of heights and ends the night dancing in a sticky-carpet basement bar called Palms, grinning at Gus in a crowd that feels like all of gay Sydney condensed into one room.

(Context: Like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, Janetti turns travel into emotional cartography. But where Gilbert seeks transformation, Janetti seeks confirmation: the coordinates that line up to Brad.)

North Star

You can go anywhere and still be at home if the laugh you love is audible somewhere up the trail—or across a sticky dance floor.

Under every itinerary is a love story. Janetti met Brad on Mykonos at thirty-five, offered him dessert at Niko’s Taverna, then kissed him on the dance floor thirty minutes later. He lied that he was thirty-two (fine), and Brad lied that he was a model in Athens (adorable). In the retelling, they tag-team the memories—Miu Miu boots, aloe vera, Patti LuPone’s “I Dreamed a Dream” at sunset—and you feel why they’ve returned to the same hotel, the Belvedere, ten-plus times. The island changed (100-euro sun beds, charm displaced), but the point stayed: “I’m so happy we’re back.”

Anniversaries, Foghorns, and Apples in the Grass

On their 22nd anniversary aboard the QM2, after a night of foghorn blasts that made sleep a myth, he records the moment that matters: “Every July 2… I’m taken back to that day… seeing Brad’s face for the first time as he walked down that winding path in Mykonos.” During the wellness retreat’s finale, the image is apples in a circle on grass: he arrives to Brad’s voice—“I knew you’d make it”—and sits down to eat, side by side. The bliss and the bickering (he will never forgive Brad for not waiting on that first hike) are the couple’s oxygen.

When the Dream Hotel Becomes Too Much

His long stay at London’s Covent Garden Hotel is a fantasy turned claustrophobia. For months he lives a stage-play guest life—“Are you joining us for tea?” “How was the theatre?”—until one Sunday the “good mornings” run out. He stops wanting to be touched by the place. Yet even here, love anchors him: the show (Vicious) is why he’s in London; “my dog, my husband, my bed, my home” are where he’s headed. When the scaffolding finally comes down after he’s left, he writes the hotel to say hello. The relationship can’t be what it was, but it can be remembered fondly.

Finding Your People at the Edge of the World

Touring Australia alone, he jitters with anxiety before two “evening-ish” stage shows in Melbourne, then discovers the country’s best coffee (sorry, Starbucks) and friend Gus, who becomes his “Aussie mate.” Mel from the Taronga Zoo takes him behind the scenes to meet koalas (he will never forget that it takes a week for a koala to… you know). In Sydney, he does the Harbor Bridge climb despite a terror of heights and ends the night dancing in a sticky-carpet basement bar called Palms, grinning at Gus in a crowd that feels like all of gay Sydney condensed into one room.

(Context: Like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, Janetti turns travel into emotional cartography. But where Gilbert seeks transformation, Janetti seeks confirmation: the coordinates that line up to Brad.)

North Star

You can go anywhere and still be at home if the laugh you love is audible somewhere up the trail—or across a sticky dance floor.

Janetti’s travel OS is refreshingly ruthless. He never checks a bag. Ever. Pack for three days, then wash and repeat at a local laundromat (which doubles as culture class). Supermarkets are the true museums; Monoprix dairy aisles the galleries. Airports look at your carry-on like a diploma: “See ya later, suckers!” as he breezes past baggage claim. He endorses real clothes on planes (zippers exist), a book always in your bag, one suit/pants/three shirts max. He’d rather buy a sweater abroad than haul seven he won’t wear.

A Luxury Hack with a Heart

His best tactic: the one-night five-star stay. Book six nights in budget digs (clean, not gross), then one night at the Four Seasons (or equivalent). Arrive at 9:00 a.m., use the facilities all day, sleep, and check out late (“Ask for 2:00 p.m.; leave at three”), storing bags to keep the pool/beach until sunset. “Free” breakfast is your brunch-to-dinner bridge. You experience the resort’s soul at a fraction of the cost, and your social feed will assume you lived there all week (he’s transparent about the optics—and the ethics).

The tactic comes with a shadow: on that one Hawaiian night he also realized he was with the wrong person. Beauty stripped the pretense. That’s a travel truth: in place of errands and email, you meet your life plain. He later returns to the same resort with Brad to overwrite the memory, which doubles as advice: convert a bad travel story into a better one when you can.

Hotels Over Houses (And Why)

He begs you not to stay in spare rooms once you’re past fifty—unless it’s immediate family or your truest friend. A hotel preserves sovereignty. In a rich person’s guest wing, you’re a bartered jester, paid in canapés. In a hotel, you can be deliciously polite because you can escape. He also codifies the manners that his bellman years at New York’s Paramount taught him: tip housekeeping daily with a note; tip concierges as a team; push your chair in; say “please/thank you” to the staff you habitually overlook. His love letter to housekeeping is one of the book’s most generous passages.

(Comparison: Anthony Bourdain preached light packing and authenticity; Janetti adds etiquette and performance literacy—how to protect your energy and be kind.)

The “Always” List You Can Actually Use

• Keep your passport current (go check the date now).
• Ask for upgrades and booths. Worst case, you hear “no.”
• Take one unplanned day each trip—walk, see a movie, sleep in, pretend you live there.
• Learn to say “Do you speak English?” and “good morning/night” in the local language.

Ethos

Travel light, tip heavy, be honest about what you like, and let civility be your souvenir.

Janetti’s travel OS is refreshingly ruthless. He never checks a bag. Ever. Pack for three days, then wash and repeat at a local laundromat (which doubles as culture class). Supermarkets are the true museums; Monoprix dairy aisles the galleries. Airports look at your carry-on like a diploma: “See ya later, suckers!” as he breezes past baggage claim. He endorses real clothes on planes (zippers exist), a book always in your bag, one suit/pants/three shirts max. He’d rather buy a sweater abroad than haul seven he won’t wear.

A Luxury Hack with a Heart

His best tactic: the one-night five-star stay. Book six nights in budget digs (clean, not gross), then one night at the Four Seasons (or equivalent). Arrive at 9:00 a.m., use the facilities all day, sleep, and check out late (“Ask for 2:00 p.m.; leave at three”), storing bags to keep the pool/beach until sunset. “Free” breakfast is your brunch-to-dinner bridge. You experience the resort’s soul at a fraction of the cost, and your social feed will assume you lived there all week (he’s transparent about the optics—and the ethics).

The tactic comes with a shadow: on that one Hawaiian night he also realized he was with the wrong person. Beauty stripped the pretense. That’s a travel truth: in place of errands and email, you meet your life plain. He later returns to the same resort with Brad to overwrite the memory, which doubles as advice: convert a bad travel story into a better one when you can.

Hotels Over Houses (And Why)

He begs you not to stay in spare rooms once you’re past fifty—unless it’s immediate family or your truest friend. A hotel preserves sovereignty. In a rich person’s guest wing, you’re a bartered jester, paid in canapés. In a hotel, you can be deliciously polite because you can escape. He also codifies the manners that his bellman years at New York’s Paramount taught him: tip housekeeping daily with a note; tip concierges as a team; push your chair in; say “please/thank you” to the staff you habitually overlook. His love letter to housekeeping is one of the book’s most generous passages.

(Comparison: Anthony Bourdain preached light packing and authenticity; Janetti adds etiquette and performance literacy—how to protect your energy and be kind.)

The “Always” List You Can Actually Use

• Keep your passport current (go check the date now).
• Ask for upgrades and booths. Worst case, you hear “no.”
• Take one unplanned day each trip—walk, see a movie, sleep in, pretend you live there.
• Learn to say “Do you speak English?” and “good morning/night” in the local language.

Ethos

Travel light, tip heavy, be honest about what you like, and let civility be your souvenir.

Beneath the quips is a moving meditation on getting older. Young Gary ate cookies alone in the school library; adult Gary commands a table for one. Fifty-something Gary glances in a window in Mykonos and sees, for a split second, the thirty-five-year-old who fell in love, then the elder statesman he’s become. Nostalgia isn’t a trap here; it’s a lens.

The Shoulder in London, The Song on the Plane

At nineteen, he chooses Starlight Express over Antony Sher’s legendary Richard III and regrets it—except for one moment on the bus back to Oxford when he rests his head on his roommate David’s shoulder. “It’s nothing… and it’s everything.” Later, he sits beside folk icon Judy Collins on a flight and says nothing, even though her “Both Sides Now” once scored his childhood. There’s a grace in letting some connections remain unspoken; adulthood is knowing which.

The Tokyo Birthday and the Woman Named Betty

On that world-cruise segment, he flees the two-day birthday loop and spends the day alone in Tokyo. Waiters ambush him with “Happy Birthday” in a half-empty hotel restaurant; he pleads for them to stop, then cries. Weeks later, a mother-daughter from the ship sends him the Daily Programme where he’s named among those with the rare double-birthday. “Something so special.” The ache and the sweetness coexist.

On the foggy QM2, he and his 92-year-old father walk the decks. They meet Betty, 94, chic and lost on the way to the cinema; she tells his father, “You look great,” and he beams in a way only a stranger can provoke. They pass black-and-white photos of Elizabeth Taylor and David Niven; his father speaks their names like rosary beads. We all need to be seen in our language once in a while.

Loneliness, Rehearsed and Revised

In Melbourne, the night before his shows, he eats alone at a buzzy restaurant and feels the old thirteen-year-old rise up. Two Instagram followers-turned-friends join for a drink; it helps. The next day he discovers his people—hundreds at the show—and the anxiety dissolves. Aging means recognizing the recurring scenes (the counter, the table for one, the sparkler you didn’t order) and allowing new actors to enter them.

(Compare to Joan Didion’s quietly accruing self-portraits; Janetti is warmer and funnier but similarly precise about time’s drafts.)

Final Note

You don’t outrun who you were; you seat them beside you and order dessert. Sometimes you offer a bite to a stranger named Brad—and the rest of the menu writes itself.

Beneath the quips is a moving meditation on getting older. Young Gary ate cookies alone in the school library; adult Gary commands a table for one. Fifty-something Gary glances in a window in Mykonos and sees, for a split second, the thirty-five-year-old who fell in love, then the elder statesman he’s become. Nostalgia isn’t a trap here; it’s a lens.

The Shoulder in London, The Song on the Plane

At nineteen, he chooses Starlight Express over Antony Sher’s legendary Richard III and regrets it—except for one moment on the bus back to Oxford when he rests his head on his roommate David’s shoulder. “It’s nothing… and it’s everything.” Later, he sits beside folk icon Judy Collins on a flight and says nothing, even though her “Both Sides Now” once scored his childhood. There’s a grace in letting some connections remain unspoken; adulthood is knowing which.

The Tokyo Birthday and the Woman Named Betty

On that world-cruise segment, he flees the two-day birthday loop and spends the day alone in Tokyo. Waiters ambush him with “Happy Birthday” in a half-empty hotel restaurant; he pleads for them to stop, then cries. Weeks later, a mother-daughter from the ship sends him the Daily Programme where he’s named among those with the rare double-birthday. “Something so special.” The ache and the sweetness coexist.

On the foggy QM2, he and his 92-year-old father walk the decks. They meet Betty, 94, chic and lost on the way to the cinema; she tells his father, “You look great,” and he beams in a way only a stranger can provoke. They pass black-and-white photos of Elizabeth Taylor and David Niven; his father speaks their names like rosary beads. We all need to be seen in our language once in a while.

Loneliness, Rehearsed and Revised

In Melbourne, the night before his shows, he eats alone at a buzzy restaurant and feels the old thirteen-year-old rise up. Two Instagram followers-turned-friends join for a drink; it helps. The next day he discovers his people—hundreds at the show—and the anxiety dissolves. Aging means recognizing the recurring scenes (the counter, the table for one, the sparkler you didn’t order) and allowing new actors to enter them.

(Compare to Joan Didion’s quietly accruing self-portraits; Janetti is warmer and funnier but similarly precise about time’s drafts.)

Final Note

You don’t outrun who you were; you seat them beside you and order dessert. Sometimes you offer a bite to a stranger named Brad—and the rest of the menu writes itself.