One of the analog pleasures I miss most in our digital world is sitting on a stool behind the jewelry counter at my late Aunt Mary’s boutique on Newtown Lane examining catalogs from travel agencies. Her stock in trade were bohemian batiks and block prints, string bikinis in jewel colors, and gypsy skirts imported from India and Indonesia, and the air in the shop had a very particular smell of ironed cotton with a hint of cinnamon.
My Aunt Mary was a sophisticated, Gauloise-smoking globe-trotter who had hitchhiked barefoot through Yugoslavia as a teenager in the late 1940s, trundled through Jaipur and Jodhpur on a train rereading the novels of E.M. Forster, and lived for years at a time in Berlin and Marrakesh, but she, like me, could glean hours and hours of happiness and content from simply reading the truncated descriptions of motels on Route 66, or bungalow colonies in Bermuda, that you got in a thick travel agency brochure from Thomas Cook or Carlson Wagonlit.
Do you remember the huge AAA — “Triple A” — guides that recommended hotels, motels, and campgrounds in regions across the country (as I recall, a New England guide, a Florida guide, and so on)? The hotel, motel, and restaurant listings were tiny and truncated, crammed with abbreviations (“CB” for “cocktail bar”), but they delivered all the details the pre-internet clientele needed to fire their imaginations with full Technicolor dreams of their next holiday: Kidney-shaped pool, check! Palm trees, check! And a “modified American plan” (“MAP”) of hot omelettes and granola parfait each morning in an air-conditioned breakfast room, then, after returning from a day on donkey back touring caverns, a candlelit dinner on the veranda as the geckos crept on fronds of palm and the macaws squawked in the fig trees.
My delight in vacation planning carried over into the dawn of the computer age. The very first thing I ever did, circa 1991, when AOL was launched into the world to a public agog at its awesome futuristic power, was to insert my floppy disk, fire up my big-box desktop “word processor,” and begin reading commercial airline schedules online!
This was before there were any images at all on AOL, and AOL was the only internet service available. My word processor was tucked into a cubby-hole mini-office — an alcove not more than a yard wide — in a studio apartment at 26 East 10th Street, between Fifth and University. Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere lived upstairs and I sometimes saw them in the elevator. All AOL was, was text rolling and flashing on a black screen, no graphics, but how excited I was to have the entire flight schedule of KLM and British Airways at my fingertips, planning and dreaming as Cindy tried on white tank tops before the mirror in their penthouse apartment while George Michael’s “Freedom! ‘90” blared from the DVD player.
(Actually, as an irrelevant but perhaps interesting aside for readers who enjoy gossip, I remember Cindy and Richard, the handsomest man in Hollywood movies, the star of “An Officer and a Gentleman,” riding the elevator not as a couple but alone, and she looked sad, with her arms crossed across her chest as if she were cold. Probably this was a technique to foil the paparazzi, so pictures couldn’t be stolen of them and assumptions about their relationship made in The Enquirer and Star Magazine, based on their gestures and facial expressions. I can also remember, maybe 10 years earlier, seeing another supermodel, Cheryl Tiegs, arriving separately from her husband, Peter Beard, at the East Hampton cinema, each one buying their movie ticket alone a couple minutes apart from each other, as I, just a kid, stood with a Charleston Chew and observed in the lobby. The loneliness of the Great Beauty. See also: Princess Diana.)
Why should watching full-color, high-production-value videos and TikToks of hotels in Honolulu be less interesting and less enjoyable than reading a bare-bones, black-and-white description of the same hotel in the old AAA TourBook guide? The answer to the question of why vacation planning has lost its magic is a dreary answer, I fear, the sort of simpering and virtuous lamentation you hear from a third-grade teacher who the kids find annoying: because our imaginations are more interesting than the reality. The dreaming is gone, and there are few surprises.
Here’s what AAA would have said about the Rock Sound Club and Resort of South Eleuthera, in the Bahamas:
“Accom.: 40 bungalow-style rooms, some with kitchenettes & private patios (PB). Amenities: FP, COF, TV, CR, S (outdoor pool), E, V. Dining: R + CB; nightly live entertainment in CB. Recreation: Poolside lounging, beach access, fishing/cruises, local museum nearby. AAA Notes: Casual resort with vintage charm, popular with families. Originally Rat Pack haunt in 1950-1960s. Solid service, friendly staff, relaxed atmosphere. Some units need updating. Rates: $$ (moderate).”
The AAA TourBook had little icons, as well, if I remember correctly, representing the presence of television sets, telephones (a red dial phone), and air-conditioning (a snowflake). You had to decode the listing, part hieroglyph, part romantic haiku.
Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to afford a vacation with my two children, who are nearly no longer children. We went to Rome in the summer of 2022 (the Hotel Cavalieri, c. 1963, television icon, telephone icon, snowflake, CB, P, R, COF). They were too young to appreciate it as I wanted them to, and instead of being thrilled and chilled to visit the very Campus Martius where Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times, only wanted to eat pasta with various forms of meat ragu and to try on sweatshirts at stores like Zara that they could find in an American shopping mall. To travel-plan is to dream. We have had a rather rough few years, but I would like to meticulously over-organize a family trip again, and have my sights set on the Grand Canyon and the American Southwest. We will drive the old highway through Williams to Flagstaff, listening to Willie Nelson sing “A Song for You” and “Whiskey River,” and take U.S. 89A through Sedona and Jerome. I have my eye on the Monte Vista Hotel, where Gary Cooper once relaxed among the Ponderosa pines, and the Canyon Motel and RV Park, where you can slumber in the double bunk of a restored 1920s train car. As Debbie Harry of Blondie said, dreaming is free.