BOB REEVES / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, November 3, 2007 7:00 pm
Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” find it easy to identify with Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit who wants nothing more than to stay at home in his snug, cozy burrow with plenty of good food.
Nevertheless, Bilbo has a harrowing adventure that takes him far from his home in the Shire to strange lands with goblins, elves and other fantastic beings.
It’s also easy to identify with Frodo, Bilbo’s adopted nephew, who hears his uncle’s stories and longs to get outside the Shire and have an adventure of his own. But he ends up getting a bigger adventure than he bargained for.
Those conflicting drives — the pull of the comfortable and familiar vs. the yearning for new experiences in unaccustomed surroundings — are basic parts of the human psyche. They explain the ambivalent and often contradictory attitudes people have toward traveling.
Most people want a vacation: from work, from the daily grind, from the year-in, year-out responsibilities of life. Traveling to a different state or country, and engaging in activities that are stimulating, fun — and above all, different from the routine — has great appeal.
“Travel is a wonderful reward for people who have worked hard all year themselves or for their family,” said Rose White, a spokeswoman with AAA Nebraska. When people vacation, she said, they often view it as a way of paying themselves back for keeping their noses to the grindstone the rest of the year.
That’s why, even with the rising costs of fuel, airfares, hotels and other expenses, there are few signs that people are traveling less.
Travel industry sources report that people are willing to scrimp on other expenses throughout the year in order to have money for vacations. Vacations now tend to have fewer days per trip because of money and time constraints. But people still want to travel and get the most out of the time they have.
At the same time, many Americans still identify with Bilbo, wanting all the comforts of home.
According to a recent report from the Travel Industry Association, today’s travelers, especially Baby Boomers, seek hotels and resorts with creature comforts and look for “the best of the best” in accommodations, even when they’re thousands of miles from home.
Today’s travelers are looking for “a piece of adventure that they can afford — that they can live,” said Holly Kaiser, an independent travel agent with Via Van Bloom Tour and Travel Service. But that definition of adventure frequently takes the form of “a gorgeous resort where you can have somebody else wait on you and pick up your clothes,” she said.
That’s one reason, she said, that cruises are still one of the most popular travel options. You get on the cruise ship and it takes you to exotic islands or past majestic seacoasts, with stops at ports of call where you can rub elbows with the natives. But you still get scrumptious meals created by the ship’s reliable chef, a plush and predictable bedroom each night and plenty of planned activities and social opportunities onboard ship.
Kaiser and her family have taken a number of trips to Disney World, which has many of the same features as a cruise. There are plenty of things to do and sights to see, but they’re all contained in the planned and scripted “world” of the theme park.
Phil Walker, director of marketing for Executive Travel, said Americans are becoming more sophisticated in their travel tastes and demands. People don’t want to go to Paris and just see the Eiffel tower or go to Rome only to visit St. Peter’s. “People are looking for a life experience, something that broadens their perspective on life,” he said.
A popular destination is the Holy Land, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and the Apostles, Walker said. Other popular adventures include trips to Antarctica, the base camp on Mount Everest and Angel Falls in Venezuela.
Travelers also enjoy a totally planned tour that takes them to people, places and experiences they could never have at home, yet avoids the uncertainty of making their own travel arrangements or hunting for a hotel in a foreign city, Walker said.
Last spring, Walker led a “Sound of Music” tour to Germany and Austria that included a boat ride on the Rhine River, castles and palaces, quaint European villages and several of the locations where the movie musical was filmed.
Larry and Jean Hennings of Lincoln went on that tour, and said it gave them a chance to visit many out-of-the way places they would never have discovered on their own, but also saved them the worries and headaches of planning a trip.
“I liked the fact that we got to stay in little quaint hotels — not Holiday Inns,” Jean Hennings said. One of their favorites was a small hotel in Meersburg, Germany, that was a converted barn. It had window boxes with flowers on every floor and still had the rope that once was used to haul hay to the haymow.
Ken and Sharon Jirovsky, a Lincoln couple who also went on a “Sound of Music” tour, said one of the trip’s highlights was visiting a salt mine at Berchtesgaden, near Salzburg, where they slid from level to level in the mine on a wooden slide. “It was like a fun house in an amusement park,” Sharon Jirovsky said.
Larry Hennings enjoyed taking digital photos of street scenes with centuries-old architecture, picturesque mountain castles and fishing villages along the Rhine. A big appeal, he said, was seeing things you could never see in Nebraska.
The Hennings are planning to go on two other tours next year. One called “I see London, I see France, I see Europe at a Glance,” will cover six countries in 13 days, and the other, “Under the Tuscan Sun,” will tour Italy.
A big part of the appeal of traveling is being free from normal schedules and responsibilities.
That’s why Velma Lassen, a AAA travel agent in Lincoln, wishes people wouldn’t take their laptops or cell phones along on vacations.
She agrees with the philosophy expressed by author George Santayana in his essay “The Philosophy of Travel”:
“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life….”
In that same vein, travel writer Pico Iyer wrote: “For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light.”
Seeing how people live in other places, sampling different foods, and trying out the tempo of a different culture can give us a new perspective on ourselves, Iyer says.
Traveling, he writes, “whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head… It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.”
It’s a cliche to say that the world is growing smaller. The globe isn’t shrinking. But the speed of travel coupled with much easier access between people of many different cultures is creating a sense of worldwide community.
“We have a global economy and a global world, and people want to experience that,” Kaiser said. In past generations, Americans were content “to see the USA” and read about other countries. Today, people want to experience other cultures first-hand, she said.
Another appeal of traveling is an opportunity for families to have some quality time together, away from the demands of school, work and other activities.
That has helped lead to an increase in multigenerational travel with grandparents, parents and children all taking a trip together.
Terri and Doug Bartzatt have taken a lot of intergenerational trips over the years, and it’s given them many cherished family memories. Terri Bartzatt remembers taking a trip to the Grand Canyon and Disneyland 20 years ago with her husband’s parents and their own young children. About 16 years ago they had a four-generation trip to Disney World and Florida beaches including themselves and their kids plus her parents and her grandmother.
While traveling with such a large group can present some logistical issues, the benefits outweigh the problems, she said.
“We all enjoy the same sort of activities, and when you all go together you can share the memories,” she said.
She also took a trip to Europe with her two daughters and her parents. “We saw things we’d never see in Nebraska. No matter how expensive it is, we’d still want to travel.”
They save money on trips to Florida by owning timeshares on condos in Orlando and the beachfront, which also provide accommodations for large groups. The Hennings have a timeshare in Hawaii, where they’ve taken many vacations, but it also allows them to stay at other timeshare locations in other states and countries.
Lisa Bogus, another avid traveler, called by cell phone from Florida to report on her family’s intergenerational trip to Disney World last October. Grandparents, parents and kids all enjoyed going on the same rides and watching the fireworks and light show together, she said.
“It’s neat for my parents to see my kids’ reactions, and I enjoy seeing the joy my parents are getting out of it,” she said.
The Jirovskys are planning an intergenerational trip with 10 people to Germany and the Czech Republic, where they’ll explore their family histories.
Both Jirovskys love history and enjoy being where history took place. A few years ago in Boston, they took a self-guided tour of the old city. “It took us about three times as long as anyone else, because we had to stop and see everything,” she said.
Ken Jirovsky worked for many years for Nebraska Book Company, a job that involved lots of traveling to book fairs, conventions and elsewhere. That job didn’t kill his desire to travel, now that he’s retired.
“We decided that there’s a lot of the world that we haven’t seen, so we want to go,” he said.
A few years ago they went with another couple to Paris, making all the travel arrangements on their own. They’re planning a March trip with Walker to the Holy Land, and have no worries about safety, even in the always turbulent Middle East.
“We’ll be in Jerusalem most of the time, which is one of the safest cities in that area,” he said.
“I figure I could get shot in Omaha,” Sharon Jirovsky said.
Reach Bob Reeves at 473-7212 or breeves@journalstar.com.