Gullible's Travels: The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist (2 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Gullible's Travels: The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist by Cash Peters. Copyright 2003 by Cash Peters
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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1 (CONT'D)

THE MAIN REASON I'D LEFT BRITAIN in the first place was because of "the museums thing."(1) Somehow--don t ask me how; scientists at some of our top universities are working on this right now--very early on in what I laughingly call my radio career, I'd been categorized by producers as the Best Goofy Tour and Kooky Museum Guy in the Business (or the Begotokomugubu for short). And before you say it, I realize it's hardly something you'd put on your r?sum?, much less reveal to total strangers in a book, but back then it didn't seem like such a bad place to be, you know? And it sure beat the hell out of the ghastly office job I had before it.


Basically what it boiled down to was this: If some screwball in Scotland decided to build a bungalow entirely out of used hemorrhoid cream tubes, I would be dispatched to Anusol Towers, tape recorder in hand, to interview him.

Similarly if a story came down the wires about a new museum dedicated to the history of clotted cream, or stilt-walking, or if it featured the world's largest collection of cracked pipes, or some other insane and pointless infatuation that nobody but the owner and his family, and sometimes not even his family, were interested in, my phone would ring within minutes and, bingo, I'd be off again. And since:
1. wacko attractions are never in short supply (take it from me, 30 percent of the population of any country is absolutely nuts);
2. news programs love including this kind of screwy, light-hearted stuff at the end of a particularly heavy program (it helps leaven the mix and leaves the audience smiling); and
3. no other journalist on the planet would touch this crap with a bargepole (not even a bargepole on loan from the "Bargepoles Thru the Ages" exhibit at The National Museum of Bargepoles) ...
... I was kept very busy.

In no time at all I became a specialist in odd. Then I cornered the market in strange. Shortly after that, weird and goofball were on my beat too. And, last of all, the much-coveted "lovably eccentric." I was at the top of my game!

Trouble is, in the media, once you succeed at something, even if it's something incredibly pitiful and sad, that's all they ever let you do. Result: a decade and a half on, I was still at it. Going to San Diego, California, to look at a chicken with two asses. Going to Lapland to visit Father Christmas's post office. Going to Salzburg, Austria, for the Sound of Music tour. Come to think of it, I'd worked for four different radio stations in Britain over the years and at every single one of them an editor had at some point walked up to me and told me about this crazy attraction in Austria he'd just read about.

"It's a tour ... of the Sound ... of Music ... movie locations," he would say, speaking in chunks, in case I got too excited and began to hyperventilate.

To which I'd reply, "Wow, you're kidding me! They really have such a thing?"
"You bet. Want to go?"

And within forty-eight hours there I'd be, on a coach rattling down an Austrian hillside with a bunch of other losers, yodeling "The Lonely Goatherd" at the top of my voice, happy as a clam. Why? Many reasons. Because Salzburg happens to be one of the most captivating cities in all of Europe, if not the world. It's one of the few places that Las Vegas still hasn't built a duplicate of, so there are no shortcuts: you really have to get on a plane and go there. Also because, at heart, I guess I'm just a hapless drifter who loves being on the road at other people's expense. But finally--and this is the main one--because I'm a total sucker for cheesy museums and tours. I am. I can't help it. If it's tacky, lowbrow, kitsch, crappy, a third-rate rip-off of something better, or just a splendid idea incompetently executed, for some reason I'm driven to hand over good money to see it.

Even when I emigrated to Los Angeles, where, with my slate wiped clean and my carte painted blanche, I was free to be bold and strike out in any direction that grabbed my fancy, I quickly lapsed into my old ways. Within weeks, a travel show on American public radio offered to broadcast my work and, like a fool, I accepted. So, after that, I guess it was just a matter of time before one of the producers stopped me in the corridor with an idea.

Oh, but not just any idea: the idea to end all ideas.

"You know ... where we ... should send you?" he said, speaking in chunks.

"THE SOUND OF MUSIC TOUR, again?"

"I know. This is the fifth."

"But why?" Picking at a salad, Mandy made a bad job of concealing her disappointment. "Why would you even bother?"

"Because they offered it to me," I shrugged, failing to mention that I'm also an idiot.

The tour, like the movie itself, like my career, is locked in time. It's always the same. Starting in the center of Salzburg, you get to see the original convent used in the film (from very far away), two castles that doubled for the Von Trapp family's home--one for the front of the house (also from far away), the other for the rear ("If you squint through the trees, you can just see the chimney.")--then, to a rousing chorus of "Do-Re-Mi," which leaks from the coach's sound system like gas from a grill, it's on to the gardens of the seventeenth-century Hellbrunn Castle and the glass pavilion where Julie Andrews kissed Christopher Plummer, or someone who looked suspiciously like him.

"This is the original pavilion from the film," one guide assured us, "except for the roof, the windows, the walls, the benches, and the floor, which have all been replaced."

Ooooh!

But apparently nobody cares that it's a fake. Some of the older fans even try skipping around the benches the way Liesl did in the movie, pretending they're sixteen going on seventeen when really they're seventy going on eighty, and very nearly break their necks.

After this you're herded onto the bus for a short drive into the Salzkammergut, a rather convoluted Austrian way of saying mountains, and the climax of the tour: Mondsee Cathedral, where Maria's wedding scenes were shot. Then, with half the coach singing "Climb Every Mountain" and the other half crying, it's back on the bus again, ready for the return trip to Salzburg, where your best bet is to find a bar and spend the rest of the night getting wasted, trying to forget the horror of it all.

One Australian guy who, every time I looked, seemed to be taking photos--of the houses, the mountains, the pavilion, the group--admitted to me later that he had no film in his camera. He was just too embarrassed. I know how he feels. Nobody wants their friends to learn they've been out doing stuff like this. It's camp, it's ridiculous, and it's humiliating--that's what makes it so irresistible!

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[1. There was also the family thing, but let's not talk about that. It's too depressing. All I'll say is that my brother thinks I'm crazy, his wife thinks I'm lazy and crazy, and my Dad doesn't know what to think, although I'm sure that, given half a chance, he'd trade me in on eBay for a son who actually does something valuable for a living and doesn't waste his time trying to be a writer, which as everyone knows is "not work." Nuff said.]

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