I recently came across a newspaper article that reported on National Geographic travel magazine’s “50 must-see spots for the complete traveler.” For example, under the category of urban spaces were listed the beautiful cities of Barcelona, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and of course Venice. There were also plenty of other categories, too, and here are just a few of them, along with most of the destinations.
World wonders: The Taj Mahal in India, Vatican City in Rome, the Pyramids in Egypt, the Acropolis in Athens, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Alps in Europe, Big Sur on the California coast, coastal Norway, England’s Lake District, the Loire Valley in France, North Island in New Zealand, and Tuscany in Italy.
Wild places included the Amazon Forest, Antarctica, the Australian Outback, the Canadian Rockies, the coral reefs of Papua-New Guinea, the Galapagos Islands, the Grand Canyon, the Sahara Desert, and the Serengeti in Africa.
Anyway, a few days after I had come across the “50 must-see spots for the complete traveler”, I found myself in a conversation with my daughter and it turned out that she had seen the very same article.
“How many of those places have you been to, Dad?” she asked me.
“Oh, not that many, I’m afraid.”
“I think traveling is the best education a person can have,” she continued. “Don’t you?”
“Traveling definitely is really important,” I agreed.
“Did you do much traveling before you got married?”
“Well, when I was about your age, the U.S. Army sent me halfway around the world to visit Vietnam for a year. Does that count?”
“Sure, it does.”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking back to the newspaper article, “but if you ask me, I think National Geographic left some really important places off that list of theirs.”
“Like what?” asked my daughter with interest.
“Well, for instance Victorville, California.”
“Victorville, California?” asked my daughter.
“That’s right.”
“You mean that dusty little town in the Southern California desert that we visited on our way back from that family vacation we took to Las Vegas years ago?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But all that was there was that museum for that old cowboy.”
“Hey,” I quickly reminded my daughter, “Roy Rogers wasn’t just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill cowboy. He was the King of the Cowboys!”
“Whatever. But all that museum had was a tiny, over-priced souvenir shop and a bunch of old photographs. There really wasn’t that much to see.”
“But you’re forgetting the most important part,” I said.
“Which was?”
“Trigger!”
“Oh, you mean that stupid stuffed horse that was there?”
“Hey, Trigger was anything but stupid! In fact, he was arguably the smartest horse that ever lived!”
“But he was stuffed, Dad. Now why in the world would anyone do that to a dead horse?”
“What, you think it would have been better for Roy to put a beautiful animal like that in the ground to rot?”
“And if I remember right,” continued my daughter, “he wasn’t the only thing that was stuffed in that place, either. What about that poor other horse that was there? And that cute little dog, too?”
“Well,” I guessed, “Roy probably figured that if he was going to stuff Trigger, he might as well go ahead and stuff Buttermilk and Bullet while he was at it. He really loved those animals, and I guess he just didn’t want to part with them.”
As our conversation veered away from travel and got mired in the pros and cons of taxidermy, I couldn’t help but think back to my youth and the slow moving, carefree days leading up to puberty when I proudly carried a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lunch pail to school each day and was never without my Roy Rogers cowboy hat and six-shooters on the weekends.
“So,” asked my daughter, “you honestly think Victorville ought to be on National Geographic’s top-50 places to see?”
“Well,” I tried to explain, “all I know is that there was definitely a time in my life when I would have gladly traveled anywhere in the world just to get a glimpse of the King of the Cowboys sitting on top of the most beautiful horse that ever lived.”