How to pick a guidebook...

Guidebooks are suppose to be useful, but I have discovered they serve only to deprive you of your money and confuse you.

Yesterday, I went to Barnes and Noble and looked through all the Australia guidebooks I could find. Not one cost less then $25! Only one of the books mentioned the city I will be going to. And only two of them mentioned rugby (which is a deal breaker), and one mentioned it only in reference to Sydney. All of them gave different suggestions on where to stay. All of them had a different idea of what the word affordable means.

I decided that guidebooks are really there to make you feel like you are in control while your trying not cry in the middle of a strange country because you are lost and confused. I mean, I have million guidebooks. I carried three of them with me to Venice and I never used them. Therefore, what guidebook one gets and the reason one picks it isn't important.

I picked my new guidebook--Lonely Planet Australia--because it mentioned rugby the most...