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Press trips like this one are peculiar odysseys at best -- weird, strained honeymoons that typically take place after a quickie three-way marriage between the travel vendor (hotel, cruise line, railroad, state or country tourist board or some combination thereof), the travel vendor's public relations agency and the travel press person who may be freelance or on the staff of a magazine, newspaper or broadcast outlet, but who is invariably a shameless freeloader.

The seduction is a tough one to resist. A writer, for example, is offered an all-expense-paid trip to an exotic location, frequently on the other side of the earth, where the rumpled scribe is feted as minor royalty: wined, dined and given the sort of treatment he could never otherwise afford -- such as first-class train travel, elegant hotels and meals that would make the fabled offerings at the tables of the Sun King seem like turkey pot pie with Pepsi. What's more, the hysterical level of envy these trips ignite in friends makes taking them an imperative.

Did I mention the food? In the course of doing everything humanly possible to encourage the junket whore to write glowingly about wherever the trip has landed them, the hosts lay on extravagant food and drink as if they were, indeed, entertaining Louis XIV and company instead of a small mob of so-called "travel writers." In Spain, where we start this non-trip, it's not much of a task because the food -- chicken stuffed with olives, seafood paella with prawns the size of bananas, squid stuffed with minced ham and served in a tar-black soup, fig and anchovy salad, eggs scrambled with trout and raisins and partridge in cinnamon chocolate sauce -- is already some of the best on the planet.

I'm in Madrid only hours before I'm led down a cobblestone street to a tapas bar where I eat a concise stew of fava beans and clams in the shell and, later, bonito in a sauce of green peppers and tomatoes and later still, finely shredded ham stirred into fried green beans. The red wine is astonishingly good. Not a fat wine, a slender wine, but easy going down, easy to love. Speaking of love, Iberia is Arcadia for olive lovers -- and don't even get me started on the bread.

Our mini-feast energizes me and cancels the jet lag. It's a good thing because soon after I'm standing in Spain's great prairie of art, the Prado, before Goya's "Saturn Eating His Children," and food is the last thing on my mind. Ay, Goya! By the time he was 75 and stone deaf, he'd watched his wife and many of his children die and still wouldn't lay down the brushes. If he didn't earn the right to a Black Period, no one could -- yet he painted straight through it. And his work from that time is as it should be: all but unbearable and for all the right reasons.

The Prado holds one of Europe's greatest collections of art. If you have any interest whatsoever in the work of geniuses, the right way to take it in is to stay nearby and absorb the Prado's treasures in small doses over a period of several days. Short of that, a few hours will let you hit most of the high points and perhaps even allow you to sit for a moment and ponder how it is that a bit of tinted oil brushed on linen can transmit over centuries with a force far greater than, say, Pearl Jam being amplified across a coliseum. Unfortunately, typical of this trip, we blow through the Prado in 45 minutes or so -- just enough time to be teased by Radio Velazquez, which always plays at full volume.

But then time-compression and contemplation-starvation are the givens of anti-travel and have everything to do with the perverse, disconnected reports it generates. True, you're taken to extraordinary places, yet you're rarely in one of them long enough to have an actual experience. Instead, you come away with a fractured sense of having been someplace without any linear idea of what that place is; it's not travel, it's traveloid. Consequently, in order to hack out a "travel story" based on such frenzied movement, even writers of profound integrity may cobble together bits and pieces of reality, imagination, research, over-the-shoulder theft of other, more studious writers' notes and extrasensory perception to deliver an article that provides a more or less credible, seemingly coherent report of a journey, even though the trip has more closely resembled a drag race with meal service. Writers of not-so-profound integrity just lie their asses off (their pieces are by far the most fun to read).

But then that's the sport of it. Writing about anti-travel is like reviewing books you haven't read. Hell, writing a review of a book you've read is a cakewalk, but reviewing one you haven't read? That separates the mammoths from the munchkins. As for little concerns like accuracy, if you believe that the truth is more likely to emerge from fiction than nonfiction, then why burden yourself with compiling facts? Travel's rigorous enough.

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