The Joys of ‘Booking’ Your Journey : The writings of Bombeck and others make unforgettable travel companions.

I went cruising in the Caribbean with Erma Bombeck earlier this spring, and I’ll never forget it.

Oh, she wasn’t the ship’s lecturer, although she has played that role with pizazz.

In fact, she wasn’t on board.

But her new book--”When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It’s Time to Go Home”--was within arm’s reach. And while she is more acclaimed as a humorist, she is a deadly accurate reporter.

I was with her, on page 70, as she recalled yet another Gargantuan lunch midway through a Norwegian cruise. She said to her husband: “Why are you wearing a life preserver?” He said, “I’m not. That’s me.”

And so it went, Bombeck’s tales enhancing the journey as other writers have before. Books--whether fact or fiction--are high on my “must pack” list.

If I were traveling to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria or eastern Germany, I would carry Phyllis Meras’ beguiling new guidebook, “Eastern Europe: A Traveler’s Companion.”

Following the mighty shift away from Communist domination in eastern Europe--which eased accessibility for Western visitors--Meras spent a year exploring the territory. With graceful anecdotes and critical information, she describes the village where Johann Bach was a teen-age church organist; the railroads that sometimes run; the spa where literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fell in love at 73; a Roman stadium in Bulgaria; medieval markets; hidden art treasures; cozy coffeehouses; rambunctious beer halls and numerous examples of inefficiency--charming and otherwise--in lands little changed in 40 years.

If I were traveling to New York City, I’d pack a new guide by Betty Ross: “New York City Museums.” With the same lively format as her popular museum guide to Washington, D.C., this paperback describes in detail such famous repositories as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History.

Ross also guides you to--and through--New York City’s only remaining 18th-Century farmhouse (Dyckman House on Broadway); Edgar Allen Poe’s cottage in the Bronx, which she rates as the most authentic of four Poe museums in America, and the Governor’s Room at City Hall, where admission is free and you can examine one of George Washington’s writing desks.

Among the views of Europe that I carry along when applicable: “Adventuring on the Eurail Express,” a definitive train travel guide by Jay Brunhouse; “Cheap Eats in Paris” (fifth edition) by Sandra Gustafson, who has also written “Cheap Sleeps in Paris” and the same two titles for London; and “A New Guide to Brittany” by Michel Renouard (published by Ouest France in Rennes), the most complete description I’ve found of that ancient, sea-scraped province of France.

The newest travel books are not necessarily the best. An authoritative guide to that swath of land and sea between Sumatra and New Guinea was written more than a century ago by Alfred Russel Wallace: “The Malay Archipelago--The Land of the Orangutan and the Bird of Paradise.”

Wallace, an enthusiastic observer and a colleague of Charles Darwin, spent eight years exploring the far-flung islands by foot and native canoe. He returned to London with voluminous notes on the natives, plants, animals and insects of what is now mostly Indonesia.

In the summer of 1973, I sailed east of Bali and called at Lombok, Flores, Timor, Aru, Banda, Makassar--all described with verve by Wallace.

When I stepped ashore in the village of Dobo, on the minuscule island of Warmar, it was precisely as he had written in the paperback I carried. I could see nothing that had changed since his landing on the 8th of January, 1857.