Why do Europeans tour Illinois? To see our old-fashioned travel culture
Chicago Tribune reporter Vicki Ortiz Healy did a great job with her Oct. 15 feature titled “Illinois towns on Route 66 vie for foreign tourists.”
But did anybody catch the irony in a story that Healy chose to tell straight?
The story, datelined from Pontiac, Ill., 92 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, told how overseas visitors have been flocking to that city’s Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum, as well as to other historic-motoring landmarks along the legendary 2,448 Chicago-Los Angeles “hard road” that the federal government completed in the 1930s.
The first 300 miles of Route 66 between Chicago and St. Louis, completed in 1926, are particularly popular, Healy said, because of the many early-motoring artifacts that survive along the road—antique gas stations, “Indian trading posts,” art-deco motels, giant statues and neon signs.
“In Europe, it’s very much the epic American road trip,” 31-year-old Britisher Sonny Dudes told Healy as he pulled his rental car in to a restored Texaco gas station in Dwight. “It’s the novelty of a bygone era.”
Pontiac Mayor Bob Russell told Healy, “There are visitors on the street all day long” before hurrying off to greet a chartered motor coach full of French tourists. Russell, in fact, greets all tour buses, provides a free trolley tour of the city and even has enrolled retired foreign-language teachers from the Pontiac school system to make sure visitors are greeted in their native tongues.
“Tourism officials painted colored footprints on sidewalks to lead non-English-speaking visitors from one attraction to another, Healy wrote. John Weiss of Custer Park told Healy he’s sold more than 10,000 copies of his book, Traveling the New, Historic Route 66 of Illinois, to an army of visitors that grew from 6,900 in 2008 to more than 15,000 so far this year. They came from 84 countries.
“They’ll take pictures of our cornfields and soybeans,” Weiss said. “They spend thousands of dollars to come here. It’s their dream.”
But while the visitors and the money they spend are a welcome development in struggling Downstate communities, their appearance here has an ironic downside that the media so far have understandably overlooked: Where foreigners used to visit America in order to experience the newest, the fastest and the most technologically advanced developments—especially in travel – they now come here to experience the way things used to be.
Think about it: Not all that long ago, within the lifetime of Americans now in their 70s, people came here from Europe and the Orient to ride our 90-mph streamliners and our 300-mph pressurized 4-engine airliners.
Now that situation is flipped: Like the hyperactive Americans who once went to Europe to relax and unwind among ancient wineries and cathedrals, Europeans who rush across their continent on 200-mph TGV, AVE and ICE trains and Japanese people brought up to ride the Shin Kan Sen now come to America to experience yesteryear’s tomorrow — highway travel.
Except that while these overseas tourists can sample American car travel as a leisure activity, we’re stuck with it as the only way to get around.
Look around, people. While we were taking our eye off the ball our country got quaint.
F.K. Plous is a former Chicago & North Western Rwy. brakeman and former Chicago Sun-Times reporter who currently serves as director of communications at Corridor Capital LLC, Chicago.