The American road trip is a journey often negotiated through promotional literature, maybe most commonly through national guidebooks. But these guides, such as the AAA Tour Books, are rarely complete versions of a region, leaving out many attractions or offering only incomplete accounts. Filling this information void is the local brochure, a modest sort of travel literature that waits mostly out on the road. In my paper I examine the role of such texts in directing the traveler to that which would otherwise remain hidden.
The sort of brochures I write of are generally not available outside the region of the attractions they publicize. One comes across them in motel lobbies, rest areas, cafes--those places where the long-distance driver pauses. Many of the brochures highlight relatively obscure tourist sites, far from the urban centers and interstate corridors. I identify three types of local travel brochure: the commercial, the historical, and what I will call the local attraction, those odd, unclassifiable sites that dot the American landscape. My focus is on the last category.
I discuss the literature of three local attractions: Carhenge, near Alliance, Nebraska; the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa; and the Wisconsin Concrete park in Phillips, Wisconsin.
For the reader the literature of these sites is occasional, in contrast to the armchair literature of travel essays and guidebooks. The traveler/reader has to be in the vicinity, has to respond in the moment to the inscribed appeal of local tourism. Only on the road do these hidden sites appear, and only through the agency of pamphlets and brochures is the driver directed off the highway. My goal is to call attention to the work of this largely ephemeral and highly localized writing, and to describe some of the specific ways it can steer the American traveler.
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