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Turni Traveler to Tourist:

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fications of the client. The exact cost is reckoned and, on pay-ment of this amount, the traveler is given the familiar American Express package containing tickets and coupons to cover his entire trip.”

Today morę than ever before the traveler is isolated from -the landscape he traverses. The newest and most popular means of passenger transportation to foreign parts is the most insulating known to man. By 1958 about four times as many intemational travelers from the United States went by air as by sea. Recently I boarded a piane at Idlewild Airport in New York at 6:30 one evening. The next morning at 11:30 I was in Amsterdam. The flight was routine, at an altitude of about 23,000 feet, far above the clouds, too high to observe landmark or seamark. Nothing to see but the weather; sińce we had no weather, nothing to see at aU.(lJiad flown not through space but through time. itly only personaTsTgń thaT we had gonelśo far was the discovery on arrival in Amsterdam that I had lost six hours. My only problem en route was to pass the time. My passage through space was unnoticeable and effortless.cThe airplane robbed me of the landscape'.^

The tourist gets there without the experience of having gone. For him it is all the same: going to one place or to an-other. Today it is only by going short distances, which we still traverse on land, that we can have the experience of go-ing any place. When I have driven from Chicago to a sum-mer resort in nearby Indiana or Wisconsin, or when I used to commute from a suburb to the University by train or by car, I have had morę variety of sensations, have observed morę varied scenes, and have met morę varied people, than I did when I went from New York to Amsterdam.

For ages the sensations of going there were inseparable from the experience of being there. Nowadays, “Getting there is half the fun.” “Romę,” announces the British Overseas Airways Corporation, is “A Fun Stop.” And there is nothing morę hómogenepUs than fun, wherever it is found. Now we can have ^plenty en route. United States Lines advertises:

You’re just 15 gourmet meals from Europę on the world’s fastest ship. Caviar from Iran, pheasant from Scotland . . . you can choose superb food from all over the world, another rewarding experience in gra-cious living on this ship. There’s a pool, gym, 2 thea-tres, 3 Meyer Davis orchestras. It’s a 5-day adyenture in the lost art of leisurc.

In an accompanying photograph we see how “Mrs. Leonard Kleckner shows ofl her dogs to Chief Officer Ridington. This great modem ocean iiner has dog kennels with a veterinarian and a dog-walking area.” Shipboard swimming pools, cocktail lounges, and the latest movies! “One of the World’s great Restaurants sails for Europę” whenever a Holland-America liner pushes ofl from New York. The experience of going there has been erased. For it we have substituted all the pleasures of de luxe relaxation. Even better than at home.

If we go by air, then too we are encompassed in musie, and enjoy our cocktail in a lounge with the dćcor of the best resort hotel. In 1961, TWA began showing first-run movies on a special wide screen in the First Class section of its Super Jet flights. A full-page color advertisement for Lufthansa, German Airlines, portrays the attractive Miss Dietland von Schonfeldt—a typical Lufthansa stewardess, of “gracious background, poise and charm, intelhgence and education” who, of course, speaks fluent English. She “Invites You to an Unusual Supper Party. . . . Every flight is a charming, in-formal Continental supper party, eight jet-smooth miles over the Atlantic.”

The airline stewardess, a breed first developed in the United States and now found on all major intemational air-lines, is a new subspecies of womankind. With her standard-ized impersonal charm she offers us, anywhere in the world, the same kind of pillow for our head and the latest issue of Look or The Reader’s Digest. She is the Madonna of the Airways, a pretty symbol of the new homogenized blandness