Skip The Trip?
©2024, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

I was in the basement some time ago, trying once again to jump start my ambition to work on building a new model railroad to replace the one that had been lost in my divorce. Inertia is a difficult thing for me to overcome, and so what else is new, I mused as I stared at a partially finished divide which was intended to separate what was eventually going to be a hopefully bucolic farm scene from what are called “staging tracks” behind it. I had the general idea of what I wanted, but after more hours than usual at the Day Job I had run out of brain cells.

The place that I am representing—physical space and available time and finances not allowing a true “modeling”—is the High Peaks area of the Adirondack Mountains of Northern New York. (Alright, “Upstate,” if you must.) This scenic divide wasn’t going to be very high, just enough to block a view, but it didn’t “look” right, even in a half-finished state. I thought that I might have to do something different to get it more closely resembling the area that I wanted to depict. I certainly had enough supplies in stock to get where I wanted, if I could figure out what to do. So how was I going to get there, and break the mental logjam toward progress?

Well, I said, why not take another look at the real thing?

Now, not that long ago, that would have meant a Road Trip, which is, let us say, a bit impractical. Having moved to Western New York (again, “Upstate,” if you must) from my home in New Jersey, it might seem that I am closer to the High Peaks, but I am actually about the same travel time away, depending on exactly where in the High Peaks I’m going. To Lake Placid, for example, it’s a ten minute difference, essentially the same.

But I didn’t have to leave my home office. I could just look online.

In fact, I could look directly at the real scene that I am thinking of emulating, a stretch of road that leads down from the northeast into the High Peaks region. Those big mountains are still off in the distance so the area is more rolling hills and valleys. I can perceive this from above via satellite images. This is a concept that makes me somewhat uneasy—if this level of detail is publicly available, how much more detail is not? (I count as one of my regular readers someone who actually has the answer to this question, but would have to shoot me if that information was to be shared with me.)

A satellite view would do fine, I thought.

But I didn’t need to just make do with that, either.

I could get down to ground level and have a “street view” of the very road I was thinking of. I could “drive” right down the road and look to both sides to get a sense of what I was trying to model. And I quickly understood that not only did I not get it right, but I could not actually get it right in the amount of space I had available. The rise up to the west of the road was farther away than I recalled and it was also not as steep. However, it also had a lot more greenery than I remembered.

So I didn’t need to take a road trip to get what I needed.

And that leads to a bit of a philosophical question, which has serious implications, economic and otherwise:

Are we at the point where it’s not necessary to travel at all?

If I can see what I need to see, or “visit” a scenic or historic area without leaving my own house, then what’s the point?

I recently watched and then wrote about taking a subway ride via high-definition video. On my thirty-two inch television screen, it was, for me, very, very close to actually being on the A Train from the Rockaways to the northernmost part of Manhattan. And that’s on a screen that is now considered pint-sized and of mid-range resolution. There is a selection of electronics, mass-market, and warehouse stores where I can purchase even higher-definition television monitors that are so large that they can’t fit in my car. The images on these devices are astoundingly realistic. Colleen and I had one of these toys in our hotel room earlier this year and the picture was almost uncomfortably detailed. Wouldn’t it be more than good enough to visit a historic site, or stop by the old neighborhood, or take in a scenic view, without getting in the car or on a plane and dealing with the hassle of travel? And there’s no lack of content: an online search on the phrase “Virtual Reality Tours of Europe” returns numerous possibilities. No passport required!

However good a high-def picture is, though, you might say, it’s still only in two dimensions. Ah, I would counter, there is the three-dimensional view offered by Virtual Reality. I have not personally tried this, but my understanding is that it’s getting better and better with each iteration. With my luck and skill, though, I’d think I was walking around, say, the British Museum, and instead walk right into a wall of my house whilst wearing the VR Goggles.

So, it was hard to justify a need to travel. There are webcams and tours and a view of the Earth from far away to more close up than I would expect online. It’s a lot less wear and tear on the car, and me, and I can certainly do without a discretionary mass transit excursion, especially if it’s airborne. And it would help reduce my overall Carbon Footprint.

And am I becoming my parents?

It might seem that way. Even when my dad was still alive, the radius of the circle in which they were comfortable traveling shrank considerably from when they were younger. That shrinkage accelerated after their children left home. It was never as broad as either my brother’s or mine was, with the possible exception that they took a trip to England, although that was at our insistence. By the time my dad passed in 2013, the area from which my Mom and Dad never strayed could be measured in scant square miles, and not many of them.

Meanwhile, my interest in travel declined after September 11, 2001, but never really went away. With my new partner, the wanderlust returned with renewed vigor. Colleen and I started sharing new adventures, and revisiting some places that we’d each been to separately, but not as a couple. A roundabout path in June 2022 to an event in Nashville and back had us setting foot in eleven states in twelve days, the most for a single road trip for me since my Whirlwind Tour of 1988, which put me in fifteen states and the Province of Ontario, Canada in fourteen days. I’d already been to all fifty states on my own, but Colleen and I “colored in” Missouri, Arkansas, and Alabama as states in which we’d spent a night as a couple—new quest, new rules.

During that trip we visited several different museums. There was one in particular, which I won’t name here, that seemed to further advance my question: instead of having the actual artifacts that met the museum’s category, it had reproductions of those artifacts. We’re not talking about ancient, irreplaceable items here, but generally ordinary things, like advertisements and brochures from, say, the last 100 years or less. If the facility had a reproduction of it, surely the real thing was accessible, right? And if other museums could find a way to display the real thing under the right conditions, couldn’t this one do the same thing? More to the point, why bother going to a museum to see a copy of something if it was possible to simply view an image of that same thing online?

As long as I’m online to see images, one of them is of one of my favorite places on earth: Manasquan Beach in New Jersey. I was very happy to learn that it is covered by a website devoted to showing live webcam feeds of points on both coasts that are favored by surfers. Manasquan is a surfer’s paradise of sorts along the Jersey Shore, and this site’s only webcam on the coast of New Jersey is in the one place I’d want it to be. There is a set pattern that the webcam follows—and I believe that is actually an uncommon feature, versus a fixed, unchanging view. It provides a straight on view of the shore from its location, and then changes that view several times before panning south to where the man-made jetties help to preserve Manasquan Inlet, the water boundary with Point Pleasant and an important entry point to the ocean for fishing boats and pleasure craft. Just on the north side of the Manasquan jetty is the all important look at the prime surfing area—it is a webcam for that community, after all. Then the webcam pans back to its starting point and begins the cycle again. No, it doesn’t have sound, and it’s not necessarily the sequence I would choose. But it doesn’t take seven plus hours of driving to get there—if there’s no traffic, that is—and I don’t have to worry about parking and tolls. Or a place to stay the night, as it’s most definitely not a one day out and back trip from here. I am most grateful for being able to visit Manasquan just about any time during the day that I would like.

But it’s still not the same.

Despite the driving distance, time, or need to stay overnight at least, to me, it’s worth being there. Virtual reality may be improving but it doesn’t capture the true panorama of the sights and sounds and feeling of the shore at Manasquan… or any other shoreline I’ve been to, for that matter, from Hampton Beach, New Hampshire to Santa Cruz, California to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, to Valencia, Spain, to Watson’s Bay, Sydney, Australia. Each is the same and yet is different, and simply viewing on screen is not at all like actually being present in the moment. At some times of the day, what is sometimes called “the golden hour,” there is a certain light that still can’t quite be captured no matter how large your computer monitor might be.

You also can’t talk to anyone when you’re not physically there. Well, I suppose you could, even in virtual reality, with the right technology. Perhaps it’s “good enough”—remember that Cost to Get There In Person-- but it’s not face to face. We’ve come a long way from the advertisements that read, “Long Distance is the Next Best Thing to Being There.” We’ve come so far, in fact, that it's hard to find that specific AT&T slogan online, and by AT&T I mean the original one that was broken up into the “Baby Bells” in 1982. There are lots of ways to Not Need To Be There now. But that is still not the same as Actually Being There.

For example, Colleen and I were in Manasquan one beautiful afternoon, and I showed her the precise location of the webcam, which was atop a small house right along the beach walk. (It’s not a “boardwalk” there, but a paved walking path.) We struck up a conversation with a woman who was renting the house next to the house on which the webcam was mounted—and they did not know about it. It is small enough to miss if you’re not paying attention. And it turns out that her permanent home is just a few miles away from ours back in Western New York. I suspected I’d just invited another person to become a viewer of that webcam. Our encounter was quite unexpected.

And that’s part of the journey sometimes: the unexpected. Colleen and I were traveling back from New Jersey one rather cold morning. It was early and it had snowed just enough in the Poconos to make our drive on Interstate 380 in Northeast Pennsylvania into nothing short of a winter wonderland. It was perfect: little to no accumulation on the road surface and a covering on everything else, especially the trees that lined the route.

On the other hand, sometimes there are experiences that make me consider whether I should have opted for a virtual visit. Number One on that list is excessive traffic, sometimes with the bonus of Entitled Idiots Who Think They Own The Road. An unexpected feature of the roundabout trip to Nashville is that from the time we left home to the evening of the third day out on the road, the best meal we had was… at an Ikea in Saint Louis. And this was by a lot, even though the Swedish Meatballs (me) and Salmon (Colleen) made available by the Ikeans for hungry shoppers are not necessarily the first thing one thinks of when considering that location. (A side note on this: I still recall a talk show segment broadcast years ago on Minnesota Public Radio in which it was noted by the guest that a nontrivial proportion of Americans believed that “Ikea” was a country. To which the host replied, “Yeah, those Ikeans, you’ve got to watch out for them. You never know what they’re up to.”)

And sometimes trips are just plain disappointing. Or a segment of a trip is a sufficient enough downer that it colors the entire excursion. That also happened on the roundabout drive to Nashville: a drive along a Federal Highway that I chose spur of the moment, but turned out to be a road that passed through one forlorn-looking location after another, with “downtowns” comprised of vacant, rundown buildings that appeared as though they could barely support the single gas station/convenience store/smoke shop that was open. It would have been a lot less costly, in both time and money, to “drive” through that area virtually. And I would have skipped going past the Big Box Stores that were located on cheap land on the outskirts of what was left of town.

But you don’t know what’s around the next corner sometimes, either. On this same trip, also in Saint Louis on the same day when we had lunch at the Ikea, we also had a wonderful dinner at an intimate restaurant called Blue Strawberry. I selected it because playing there was Hot Club of Cowtown, a Western Swing trio I knew that I wanted Colleen to see. And that dinner was served to us by a delightfully surly waitress who playfully needled us all night. For example, Colleen said she would like the salmon, to which the waitress replied, “Why?” And when I made my dessert selection, she shot back, “I’m sorry.” She gave it to us, and we gave it right back, all in fun of course, and it made the evening that much more enjoyable. And of course Hot Club of Cowtown didn’t disappoint either. They have so much fun playing what they’ve chosen to share, from standards to country and particularly the music that was the staple of groups like Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, that it’s impossible to not get caught up in the enjoyment.

That night we stayed at the Saint Louis Union Station Hotel, which should not be surprising to anyone who knows me. What we did not know is that in the Grand Hall, which would be magnificent without anyone being present, there was a wedding reception going on. This is not unusual for the facility—it hosts dozens of events per year, some even more lavish than the one we viewed—but it was special to be just a little bit present for the bride and groom as they began what we hoped would be a happy and long life together.

In the morning there was one more experience before we left Saint Louis Union Station: a light and sound show that is projected on the walls and ceiling of the Grand Hall. I would quickly exhaust my superlatives in describing this, as someone might have said when the Grand Hall opened for its initial purpose in 1894. I couldn’t decide whether to marvel at the show itself or be deeply impressed with the technology that enabled artwork, birds, whales, and stars to glide across the 65 foot high arched ceiling. Unlike my virtual trip on the New York Subway, this is one time when no matter how large one’s television screen is, it is not going to match standing in the center of an over eighteen thousand square foot expanse and being immersed in a parade of sights and sounds.

So where does that leave me, and by extension, my fellow traveler and partner? Probably about where we started, actually. Places that are “on the margin” for us to visit might get a virtual look as part of our consideration. And meanwhile the wanderlust and desire for real, not virtual, adventure, won’t be silenced just yet.

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