Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 In the 1980s, every country with a middle class had gotten into the travel business. American tourists no longer stood out. The earth's travel destinations were jam-packed with littering Venezuelans, peevish Swiss, smelly Norwegian backpackers, and Saudi Arabian businessmen getting their dresses caught in revolving doors.#2 Modern travel has a lot of different types of tourists. In 1867, the famous old monuments were still there, but they were surrounded by scaffolds and green nets and signs saying, Il pardonne la restoration, please.#3 Modern tourists have seen Mannix dubbed in forty languages and the watch adjustments of Newfoundland, Malaysia, and Nepal, but the sermons in stone are all sung with cement. Cement is the granite, marble, and porphyry of our time.#4 The Grand Tour is no longer a stately procession of likeminded individuals through half a dozen of the world's major principalities. Modern tourists have to see the squalor so they can tell everyone back home how it changed their perspective on life.
