Tourism only skims surface from Venice to the Beach

ONCE UPON a time when my parents traveled to Venice, Italy, they passed under the Bridge of Sighs in a gondola. My father bent to kiss my mother, assured by local legend that they would be blessed with eternal love. "Heaven," my mother sighed.

When my brother and his bride passed under the same bridge on their honeymoon, it did not elicit the same reaction.

"Cheezmo," the bride pronounced.

She thought the gondoliers were cheezmo. The water taxi up the Grand Canal was cheezmo. The famous pigeons that filled the plaza in front of the Doges Palace were just plain dirty.

Her reaction irritated me. This was Venice, for heaven's sake. Streets filled with water. Policemen and moving men and garbage men with boats. I thought that anyone lucky enough to go to Venice should be able to pass over the touristy aspects of the place and revel in the geography.

And yet, when I got off the train in Venice last week, I found myself hustled through crowds of high school kids on bus tours. The taxi drivers nudged tourists away from the gates with irritation. Someone's suitcase banged into the backs of my knees as we passed buildings I'd seen in James Bond movies and vistas outlined during perfect weather on the travel DVD I'd borrowed from the library.

The thought came to me unbidden: cheezmo.

I wasn't sure why this was happening. I'd prepped for the trip. I'd read two novels set in Venice and a travel book. I knew that I was supposed to let myself get lost in the streets, absorb the atmosphere, get off the beaten track. Travel.

Instead, all I could see was the cheezmo. Carnival masks exactly like the ones you could get in New Orleans. Murano glass pendants like I'd seen in Macy's last Christmas.

It was enough to make me wonder why people bother to travel at all anymore. Wouldn't we all be a lot more comfortable at home ordering leather goods off the Internet and absorbing the culture from Rick Steves?

It's a question to ask, especially when you live in a place where people come on vacation. You don't have to approach Virginia Beach very long before you find a layer of cheezmo here, too.

I know that anyone going to a touristy destination could avoid the crowded cheezmo destinations and spend time prowling the aisles of the local grocery stores and visiting obscure churches and minor museums. But when they got home, wouldn't it be odd to have traveled so far and come so close and never have seen the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House or Machu Picchu or St. Mark's Basilica? Can you imagine someone coming to Virginia Beach on vacation and never stepping foot on the Boardwalk? Never laying an eye on the broad expanse of our ocean?

I thought about this while wandering through the twisted streets of Venice. Since we'd left our tour so late, shops were closing. Lights appeared in apartment windows. Waiters trucked boxes of bottled water up and down the steps on strange little carts. I guess tractor-trailers don't make deliveries to restaurants in Venice.

When we got turned around (aka lost and annoyed) we ended up in a dusky plaza where little boys played soccer on the stone piazza. I suddenly realized no one had a lawn. No one spent hours riding a lawn mower like they do at home or trucking kids to baseball games in the minivan. Mothers probably didn't worry that their kids would get hit by a car, but I bet they worried a lot that their kids would fall into the water.

That stuff didn't seem like cheezmo to me. And yet diddling around thinking about how other people live and work is not what I set out to do. The existence of the cheezmo gave it a chance to happen.

I don't know if I'm OK with that. Some part of me would still like to lounge around Venice with Lord Byron at my elbow, the two of us naming the Bridge of Sighs on our own, struggling to be understood in Italian. Some part of me would like to stroll the Boardwalk when it was made of boards, marveling at an ocean that stretched as far as the eye could see.

Jacey Eckhart, jacey87@mac.com