Rick Steves And The Human Condition
Ellen Ann Fentress
Word Count 548
When I travel again, one thing won’t have changed. Sure, I’d be delighted to stay at the kind of plush, chocolate- or Xanax-on-your-pillow chateau that Conde Nast Traveler admires, if someone would be kind enough to pay my way. Yet otherwise, I’m a sucker for a Rick Steves travel guidebook. It’s not just that his recommended spare clean rooms and communal-table restaurants with white bean specials and German tourists are better fits for my budget, although they are.
What I love is the chance to follow Steves’ meticulous blow-by-blow instructions. With cheerful certainty, he is willing to micromanage a visit to Paris, Tallinn or wherever. He can chart your day in over one hundred guidebooks on European venues from Cork to Crete.
There’s something thrilling to me in nailing every checkpoint on his logistics lists. Thanks to Steves, last time I visited Paris, I entered the Louvre via the tip-off to the secret short line: Enter the mall at 99 Rue de Rivoli (the door has a red awning). Then you buy your museum ticket at the tabac inside the connected underground Carrousel mall, as per his instructions. Steves coaches how to skip the snake of a line at one of the regular high-traffic caisses.
He explains, I comply. What is this about? Am I a sheep, who yearns to hand over her free will, vacation or not? I don’t think so. At home, I only read written directions when completely out of other answers for getting the top off the Tylenol or ink in the printer. So what’s the little thrill in holding Rick Steves close overseas?
To follow his to-dos existentially reaffirms the consolation of human connection. Travel lays bare the human situation: we’re each alone in many ways, born solo and destined to die that way too. Maybe that essential solitude —some of us experienced it physically in pandemic lockdowns—also comes through with clarity to an American on a Paris sidewalk. A day of hearing nano-speed French and awkwardly flubbing assorted customs makes our human separation sharply and unnervingly clear.
Yet then Rick Steves steps into the existential dread. You are not alone after all. He holds your hand and leads you to an affable young cashier in the Carrousel du Louvre tabac, who smiles and sells you your museum ticket. Then Steves explains to you also about the adjacent short-cut museum security line, where a Pink Panther cliché of a bored guard in uniform will wave you through the metal detector arch. A heartbeat later, you are in the overheated museum lobby, your shirt starting to stick to your back. You sense a human wholeness along with fresh sweat.
Steves teaches us, in a deep sense, to be there for each other, even if he charges $24.99 retail as he goes. His lessons preceded the pandemic, which of course brought its own confirmation of human connectedness via the stakes of shared air and vaccinated populations.
We move forward now. Saint Augustine said that the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a sole page. But will it still take thirty-seven pages to prep properly for the Louvre as travel resumes? Rick Steves thinks so.
I, for one, can’t wait.
Ellen Ann’s essays have been published in The New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Baffler and Oxford American. She teaches nonfiction writing in Mississippi University for Women’s low-residency creative writing MFA program. Follow her @ea_fentress on Twitter or through www.ellenannfentress.com
