Rick Steves: Public Enemy #1
According to the United Nations, the world population surpassed eight billion on November 22, 2022. If you’ve traveled in Europe recently, you know all eight billion have landed in Europe armed with selfie sticks, Instagram accounts, and Rick Steves tour books.
Rick Steves is a mensch, but the guy is ruining the world. His mission is to find good, undiscovered places. Special, authentic places. And then tell all eight billion people on the planet to get in line.
And, it turns out, all of them got there twenty minutes before you.
High in the Swiss Alps sits the tiny hamlet of Mürren. It looks like a caricature of a Swiss mountain village. You can’t drive there—you have to take a funicular up the steep mountainside. The last official population count was 453. They really care about cheese up there. Cheese and livestock.
A while back, Rick Steves included Mürren on his PBS series. The episode featured an extended segment of farmers bailing hay.
In 2024, Mi esposa and I went there looking for the hay-balers. Instead, we found lines.
Lots of them.
The humble town is permanently overrun by thousands of tourists, cheek to jowl, inadvertently poking each other with their selfie sticks while they queue up to get pictures of themselves standing on a particularly famous tree stump.
Instagram is a hell of a drug.
My Euro-lust predates my familiarity with the Steves-o-verse by decades, but his 30-minute travel-porn episodes have done nothing to abate it. Mi esposa and I rewatch episodes regularly, particularly when we’re getting close to taking a trip. And we’ve been lucky to get to Europe often lately, so we watch him a lot. And read the books as well. I like the sense of curiosity and fun he brings. And the emphasis on finding local culture seems sincere and heartfelt. I’d advise anyone planning a European trip to get their hands on the most current Steves book about your destination and to study it closely. And then to fervently avoid all places he mentions.
He’s inadvertently doing us a favor. He’s like a pied piper, leading all the children down a single path with his blue and gold book-shaped flute. It is just left to us to avoid that path.
We just returned from a riding trip to the Loire Valley in France. It was 95 degrees every day for the whole ride in a region where air conditioning and ice are considered absurd American luxuries. The bikes I rented were so poorly maintained that the chain was broken in several places on my first one. When I pedaled the second one up a small hill, the derailleur snapped off like an tuiles salées. I waited hours for a nearly unrideable replacement from the rental company. We rode onto a road in the process of being paved and caked our tires in hot asphalt. When we got off the road and pushed our bikes onto the shoulder, we went through a patch of stinging nettles. I also booked a hotel in the wrong city, and we had to revamp our travel plans.
And it was all glorious. Travel should be messy. People want authenticity, and there’s nothing more authentic than a little hot asphalt stuck to your tires.
We also pedalled through vineyards and poppy fields, shopped for a picnic lunch on market day in a tiny village’s town square, celebrated a friend’s sixtieth birthday with a feast on the terrace of a tenth-century abbey, happened into an underground winery on a dirt road in the middle of flat miles of vineyards, slept in a chateau, and drank with locals in a dive bar in a medieval city.
I mostly forgot to take pictures. And I wouldn’t give the name of the bar here even if I could remember it. Find your own damned dive bar.
We’ve all heard the stories of tourists overrunning every major museum in Europe, with lines going on for hours. Barcelonans are attacking tourists with water balloons and squirt guns, and Parisian waiters are more contemptuous of Americans than usual.
My question is, who can blame them? Imagine if Rick Steves wrote a guidebook about Atlanta and recommended hot dogs at the Varsity. Everyone would line up. Anytime I encountered someone with one of those stupid paper hats, I’d throw a water balloon at them too.
On a completely separate note, I really think we should use the word “rube” more often.
Cycle touring is about personal exploration. It’s about taking an occasional wrong turn and finding sublime moments when you aren’t expecting them.
Mi esposa had a toothache on this ride, and we went to see a dentist. It was one of those Catholic holidays when the entire continent of Europe shuts down, and we had to take an Uber to some small hamlet outside Orleans where a dentist was taking patients. (Unscheduled visit, national holiday—less than $100 fee with no insurance.) Because it was the middle of nowhere, we had to wait for 30 minutes for the Uber pickup after the procedure. I spotted a church on the other side of the hamlet, much grander than you’d expect in a town that size, and I just wanted to take a look. The marble steps showed the wear of hundreds of years. We stepped into the vestibule but stopped when we heard the congregants in prayer in the sanctuary.
It was, in fact, a Catholic holiday, and the solemn, sung prayers reminded me what organized religion really has to offer. For a few perfect moments, those voices in that ancient space were everything.
I’m not sure what town we were in. I don’t know anything about that church. But I’m proud that I made us get up and walk to that church instead of just sitting and waiting for half an hour.
I don’t travel to see the things the tour books tell me to see. I travel to explore. I travel to remind myself to look at everything.
This was the first bike tour for my friend Bill. I talked to him a week after we got back, and he mentioned his ride from the day before. He said he stopped multiple times, taking in a large stand of oaks or the contour of a hill under a freshly mowed field. He’d been on the same route dozens of times and had never noticed those things before. He had reengaged with the beauty of the place he lives because of the hours he spent on a bike in a distant land. I can’t imagine a better response to travel.
We covered a lot of ground on this tour. I was often in a state of awe. And other than dealing with customs, I can’t remember standing in line once. When we were in Tours, I learned that a resident male of that city is called a Tourangeau. Although I have long been known as a bicycle tourist, I now identify as a tourangeau.
I just hope Rick Steves doesn’t buy a bike.
Song of the Week
I don’t think I’ve listened to Bat Out of Hell since it was on the charts back in the 70s. Of course, everyone knows the record—it’s the fifth bestselling album in history.
But it’s also overblown and silly. Sure, it’s where the rock world learned of Ellen Foley, who inspired the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?,” but I can put on her fantastic solo album “Night Out” and avoid the pomp of Mr. Loaf.
The thing that always confused me about Bat Out of Hell is that it was produced by Todd Rundgren. Rundgren always struck me as one of the most interesting, intelligent rock guys out there. And one of the weirdest. How did he put his name on this very conventional thing?
It turns out the whole damned project was meant as a parody of Bruce Springsteen. Born to Run had put Springsteen on the cover of Time magazine the year before, and Rundgren disliked it so much that he decided to produce a record just to spoof it. He even managed to get a couple members of the E-Street Band to play on it.
I just heard this story recently, and it caused me to play the album. I cackled through the whole damned thing.
Perfect early morning read. Keep sharing. Hugs to you both.
Terrific story, Daren. We used Rick Steve's when we first went to Italy. It was before his books became travel bibles. We had amazing experiences in local spots — the owners of the hotel, restaurant, winery were happy for the attention. But then we started asking locals, and our experiences were further enriched.