Has the Romance Gone Out of Travel?
In an exchange that echoes some of the themes in my recent Atlantic column on airline glamour (link good for three days), two British writers square off in the Guardian's Observer section on the question of whether travel has lost its charm along with its hardships.
"The casual ease of travel now is a source of bewildered distress to my father's generation ('What do you mean, you're going to Bruges? For the weekend? On a whim? But you haven't even booked the ferry!')," writes Michael Bywater, who concludes "Travel is easy now. It is no longer exciting; so we have to bring our own excitement with us, in our luggage or our mind's happily deluded eye." Alexander Frater disagrees: "It is claimed too that travel has become self-delusional, that we only do it to make ourselves seem sexier, more glamorous and important. So what? All that matters is that it continues to lift the spirits and quicken the senses, and keep us alive to a world which, despite the state we've got it into, remains a place of astounding interest, beauty and variety. We're only here once, and I simply cannot understand why absolutely everyone isn't consumed by an unquenchable desire to get out there and see every last bit of it."
Since I travel constantly yet rarely leave the United States, I have none of these problems. I can go to Florence or Paris or London or Tokyo and still find plenty new to see--and those are places I've already been to at least once. At any rate, I suspect that The Guardian's audience is not as well traveled as they think they are. Outside the major cities in the United States, for instance, the only foreign tourists you usually find are Germans, who will go just about anywhere and rent RVs to do it. How many Guardian readers have driven through the desert Southwest or the Blue Ridge? And that's just the United States, which has modern conveniences and a more-or-less common language. Have they really explored all of India, China, and Brazil?
The shot above is from the Braniff archives at UT-Dallas. That's Ginger Rogers wearing the civilian clothes.