Roughing it De LuxeCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
Roughing it De Luxe
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
American wit and humor; California -- Description and travel; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Description and travel
These people constitute one breed of Eastern tourists. There is the
other breed, who are willing to see America provided it is made over to
conform with the accepted Eastern model. Those who can afford the
expense go to Florida in the winter; but it requires at least a million
in small change to feel at home in that setting, and so a good many who
haven't quite a million to spare, head for Southern California as the
next best spot on the map. Arriving there, they endeavor to reproduce on
as exact a scale as possible the life of the ultra fashionable Florida
resorts; the result is what a burlesque manager would call a Number Two
Palm Beach company playing the Western Wheel.
Up and down the Coast these tourists traipse for months on end,
spending a week here and two weeks there, and doing the same things in
the same way at each new stopping place. You meet them, part from them,
and meet them again at the next stand, until the monotony of it grows
maddening; and always they are intently following the routine you saw
them following last week or the week before, or the week before that.
They have traveled clear across the continent to practice such
diversions as they might have had within two hours' ride of Philadelphia
or New York; and they are going to practice them, too, or know the
reason why.
Of course they are not all constituted this way; I am speaking now of
the impression created in California by tourists in bulk. They decline
to do the things for which this country is best adapted; they will not
see the things for which it is most famous. Few of them take the
roughing trips up into the mountains; fewer still visit the desert
country. All about them the tremendous engineering contracts that have
made this land a commercial Arabian Nights' Entertainment are being
carried out--the mighty reclamation schemes; the irrigation projects;
the damming up of canyons and the shoveling away of mountains--but your
average group of Eastern tourists pass these by with dull and glazed
eyes, their souls being bound up in the desire to reach the next hotel
on the route with the least possible waste of time, and take up the
routine where it was broken off at the last hotel.
They tennis and they golf, and some go horseback riding and some take
drives; and at one or two places there is polo in the season. Likewise,
in accordance with the rules laid down by the Palm Beach authorities,
the women change clothes as often as possible during the course of the
day; and in the evening all hands appear in full dress for dinner, the
same being very wearing on men and very pleasing to women--that is, all
of them do except a few obstinate persons who defy convention and remain
comfortable. After dinner some of the younger people dance and some of
the older ones play bridge; but the vast majority sit round--and then
sit round some more and wonder whether eleven o'clock will ever come so
they can go to bed!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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