Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The trend is the opposite for national park vacations.
One reason for the disparity between wilderness and theme parks is the very nature of
a visit. Theme parks are an extension of everyday life requiring no more than standing in
line, going on rides, eating and repeating the process. At wilderness parks, visitors are re-
moved from their comfort zones and hike, swim and often camp, making their own meals.
Even when staying at park lodges or cabins the days are filled with exercise—and fresh air,
wild animals and stunning scenery.
That has not changed in the last three decades, though. What has changed is the non-
stop marketing and promotion of theme parks. What began with Walt Disney and his car-
toon characters now encompasses a theme park chain built around Harry Potter and his
young wizard friends in London and Orlando. The megabest-selling books and movies
draw Potter fans to the theme parks just as the Disney franchise and its movies, books,
videos and television have done for generations. Theme parks are part of the tourism
industry; the national wilderness parks are not. The new federal tourism strategy could
nudge attendance at the parks by highlighting them on the new national website and in
promotions overseas.
I took my children to Disney World in Orlando, where my son celebrated his ninth
birthday with stars in his eyes when Cinderella came over to help him blow out the
candles. They loved the roller-coaster ride through a magic mountain; they hated the song
“It's a Small World After All.” One year later we stayed at a lodge near the Hoh Rain Forest
in Olympic National Park in Washington State, climbing over fallen trees covered in slip-
pery moss and prickly ferns, running up and down the red-dirt paths toward higher ground
and a view of the Olympic Mountains on the mist-shrouded peninsula. I know which my
favorite was and which was theirs. The next year we “compromised” and traveled to Sch-
weitzer Mountain in the Idaho Rockies.
Globally both models have had their impact. Theme parks now stretch from Asia to
Europe to the United States and are expected to gross $31.8 billion annually by 2017. Wil-
derness parks are even more ubiquitous, spread across all continents and created along the
lines established by President Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the twentieth century.
The social and environmental effect of those spreading theme parks has been ques-
tioned by some high-profile critics. The best-selling author Carl Hiaasen has made a mis-
sion to jab tourist developers in nearly every mystery novel he has written that climbed to
the best-seller list. He writes children's books on similar themes featuring greedy tourist
developers who destroy Florida. He read from his book
Scat
to a group of Washington,
D.C., students one day, and I asked him afterward why he keeps pounding away at them.
He answered that that was the reason why he became a writer in the first place, to cap-
ture the dismay of watching Florida turned into a land of theme parks and tourists. “When
I was a kid hanging out in the Everglades, going to the beaches, it was a cool way to grow
up. When that is part of your childhood and you saw it paved over, you don't forget about
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