Travel & Leisure: Where to Go

The good news is that most vacations are inherently tacky, so no matter where you go, there's bound to be something to please!

However, some destinations are more satisfactory than others. Amenities may range from a casual hole-in-the-wall tourist trap stocked with postcards and snow globes to sparkling tourist wonderlands filled with fantasy architecture and creatures. Before deciding on a destination, be sure to prioritize the features most important to you so that you can better plan your trip.

A few helpful tips:

• Any attraction which moans has to be good - caverns, cows, you name it.
• Ditto for anything which distorts compass needles or requires going underground.
• Oftentimes you can judge an attraction by the size of its gift shop. If there's no gift shop, it probably isn't worth a visit.
• The best attractions will have billboards posted many miles - or states - in advance.
• If it isn't manmade, it isn't worth seeing.

International Travel
We are, sadly enough, not particularly well traveled, but we can highly recommend Rome. The Stazione Termini has numerous pickpockets, as well as a gift shop filled with particularly fine plastic replicas of local monuments. Wouldn't the Trajan Column make a perfect paperweight? Or how about a working model of the Trevi Fountain? Rome has a very rich cultural history, which allows it to legitimately offer some of the best examples of kitsch on the planet.

Couple this with the presence of the Vatican and Rome becomes doubly attractive. The gift shops on the dense warren of streets surrounding Saint Peter's offer some of the finest plastic religious artifacts in the world. A plastic holy water font magnet for the refrigerator is sure to please, as is a lifelike coin bank rendering of the Pope's head.

We were also charmed by the presence of McDonald's across from such landmarks as the Pantheon. One wonders why they don't offer a Pantheon Happy Meal® to commemorate their location.

In the States
Residents of the U.S. are blessed with some of the finest tourist destinations in the world - there are too many to catalog. Rather than recommend any particular place, we must direct you to the seminal reference, Roadside America. This must-have book catalogs the full gamut of roadside abominations in the U.S. and maps out theme tours, such as the Elvis and Atomic tours. The website of the same name is equally wonderful and also lets one purchase goodies such as muffler man T-shirts.

What to do while you're there
Regardless of where you go, once you get there, you may want to ditch visits to museums, restaurants, and parks in favor of a few of the following:

• Local pawn shop - get a taste of local culture, plus some great deals on indigenous weapons and cooking appliances. Tip: give the kids a scavenger hunt list!
• McDonalds - How do the burgers taste compared to the ones back home? This may reveal important regional or cultural differences. Tip: have the kids write a report analyzing these differences, and putting them in historical/global perspective.
• Grocery store - another cultural indicator. What kinds of weird foods do the locals eat?
• Thrift or closeout store - get great deals on local oddities and discards