Plucky Survivors See America 2006: How It All Started

Why did we do this?  Wait… before we get to that, let’s talk about who we are.  We love talking about ourselves!

We are travel writers Mary Herczog (Frommer’s, Dummies) and Rick Garman (Frommer’s, Idiots, Moon Handbooks, Vegas4Visitors) and we’ve been best friends for 17 years.  Okay, that’s enough about us.

“Maybe I’ll just go see the biggest ball of twine.”

That was kind of how it all started.  Rick was staring down the barrel of his 40th birthday and he was not handling it with the greatest of ease.  To be clear, he wasn’t considering buying a red convertible and dating a 22-year-old but forty carries a lot of baggage with it and he wasn’t immune to the concept that being a gay man in Los Angeles “of a certain age” was just this side of a death sentence.

But then there was that; the whole specter of death thing.  As much as he may not want to be turning forty, the alternative, especially considering the circumstances, was certainly less than appealing.  Head into your forties with some measure of grace and dignity or curl up into a fetal ball and weep yourself to death at 39.  It was an easier choice than he thought it would be back when he was 18 and thinking about what life would be like in 22 years.

So forty was approaching and he was looking for something to appropriately mark the occasion other than binging on bacon-wrapped hot dogs and singing out of tune karaoke.  This is not just a random thought, but what he had been doing on (or about) his birthday for the previous few years.  We’ll explain that later, we promise.  But now Rick was turning forty and so he starting looking at something slightly more grand.  Although nothing he could think of could possibly compare to Mary’s 40th birthday celebration wherein she met the Pope.  But perhaps that’s a story for another time as well.

Rick tried to figure out something that would equate, in his world, to meeting the Pope on your 40th birthday but the only thing that he could come up with would be dinner with Bette Midler, which didn’t seem either feasible so he looked at the travel aspect of things.  During frequent e-mails and phone calls, we talked about possibilities: Greece, which he did on his 30th birthday; Italy only without the Pope; a brief flirtation with Australia until Mary mentioned the 14-hour plane ride.  Either the hassle, time commitment, and/or cost of international travel knocked out each suggestion until Rick finally said jokingly, “Maybe I’ll just go see the biggest ball of twine.”

Mary responded, “Cool.  Can I go?”

During that phone call late one night in May of 2006 the two of the talked about all of the great roadside attractions they wanted to see.  The offbeat museums, the statues of Elvis in someone’s back yard, and the alligator farms.  There were giant concrete statues of animals and people and objects.  People did things like buried cars in a cornfield or erected giant metal scraps in a field and called it art.  These were the kinds of things you couldn’t see flying over the country.  You had to see it by getting on the road – the open highways and byways of America.

Then there was the food.  Sit on an airplane for 14 hours and the best you can hope for is a can of soda and a piece of warmed over chicken.  But spend a few hours on a back road in America and you’re bound to find yourself something really interesting to eat, be it barbecue, pie, cheeseburgers, barbecue, or pie.  We like barbecue and pie.

Because of its geographical convenience and the fact that Mary owned a house there, New Orleans was chosen as a beginning and ending spot.  Rick spent the next few weeks pouring over websites and guide books devoted to road trips and every day found something to call her up about.

“Did you know that there’s a Britney Spears Museum in Kentwood, Louisiana?”

“There’s a place called Dinosaur World in Arkansas with giant concrete statues of dinosaurs.”

“In Alabama there’s a grotto with miniature replicas of famous buildings that was constructed by a hunchback monk.”

Every one of these revelations was met with the kind of glee that is usually reserved for puppies and the occasional birth of a new baby.  We often joke that we share the same brain and so Britney, concrete dinosaurs, and hunchbacked monks are as appealing to one as they are to the other of us.  When we told others of our plans, they looked at us with that look – the one that says, “You guys are crazy and weird.”  But to us, it was exactly the kind of thing that we needed to do.

We had survived, up to that point, our own dramas and tragedies, both physical and mental, and had done it with what we liked to think was an admirable amount of pluck.  So what do plucky survivors do?

They go see America, of course.