Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
was my first serious brush with real tourists-retired people with trailer homes heading for
Florida, young families taking off-season vacations, honeymooners. There were cars and
trailers, campers and motor homes from thousands of miles away-California, Wyoming,
British Columbia-and at every lookout point people were clustered around their vehicles
withthedoorsandtrunksopened,feedingfromicecoolersandportablefridges.Everyfew
yards there was a Winnebago or Komfort Motor Home-massive, self-contained dwellings
on wheels that took up three parking spaces and jutted out so far that cars coming in could
only barely scrape past.
All morning I had been troubled by a vague sense of something being missing, and then
it occurred to me what it was. There were no hikers such as you would see in England-no
peopleinstoutbootsandshortpants,withknee-hightasseledstockings.Nolittlerucksacks
full of sandwiches and flasks of tea. and baker's caps laboring breathlessly up the moun-
tainsides, slowing up traffic. What slowed the traffic here were the massive motor homes
lumbering up and down the mountain passes. Some of them, amazingly, had cars tethered
to their rear bumpers, like dinghies. I got stuck behind one on the long, sinuous descent
down the mountain into Tennessee. It was so wide that it could barely stay within its lane
and kept threatening to nudge oncoming ing cars off into the picturesque void to our left.
That, alas, is the way of vacationing nowadays for many people. The whole idea is not to
expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience-indeed, not to breathe fresh
air if possible. When the urge to travel seizes you,youpile into yourthirteen-ton tin palace
and drive 400 miles across the country, hermetically sealed against the elements, and stop
at a campground where you dash to plug into their water supply and electricity so that you
don't have to go a single moment without air-conditioning or dishwasher and microwave
facilities. These things, these RVs, are like life-support systems on wheels. Astronauts go
to the moon with less backup. RV people are another breed-and a largely demented one at
that. They become obsessed with trying to equip their vehicles with gadgets to deal with
every possible contingency. Their lives become ruled by the dread thought that one day
they may findthemselves inasituation inwhich they are notentirely self-sufficient. Ionce
went camping for two days at Lake Darling in Iowa with a friend whose father-an RV en-
thusiastkept trying to press labor-saving devices on us. “I got a great little solar-powered
can opener here,” he would say. “You wanna take that?”
“No thanks,” we would reply. “We're only going for two days.”
“How about this combination flashlight-carving knife? You can run it off the car cigarette
lighter if you need to, and it doubles as a flashing siren if you get lost in the wilderness.”
“No thanks.”
