Long-time friend P. stayed with us on the first leg of his "vacation," which largely revolves around his latest multi-year obsession, bicycling. Mostly it seems to be a social hobby--I'm still trying to sort the names he mentions into their proper spheres--but was kind of taken aback when P. mentioned joining a "mystery ride." In the proverbial nutshell, the participants know where & when to show up and how many miles will be covered.
In a bit of serendipitous coincidence, I glanced at the bit of Shopper that tagged along to our visit with the bees (for a planned hive-combination that didn't didn't happen after we found a viable Queen). Apparently, you can also book a bus tour to a mystery destination. On the surface, that's kind of an alarming proposition: Give your money to strangers, climb aboard their vehicle and let them take you wherever they feel like going. (Umm, thanks, but I'd just as soon save that experience for my senility, if it's all the same to you...)
But, after further review--apparently AWOL from Chicago today--maybe there's a new value proposition not available, say, ten or fifteen years ago. When the world shrinks, there's correspondingly less room for mystery. When Dennis & I went to England in 2007, we pre-emptively attacked its possibilities by way of Fodor's, Rick Steves, maps of The Tube, the satellite view on Google Maps, and an OpenOffice spreadsheet of what venues were open when. (For the record, London still pwned us But Good with streets that changed names every few blocks, Underground stations lying about which streets they were on, the Inns of Court, and Imposter Statue, who turned out to be Not Admiral Nelson in a place that was Not Trafalgar Square.)
Fast forward to 2010, and even bijou little Annapolis Royal has Google Street View. Which has its comforts--most notably peace of mind when you're booking a place to stay. But removing the risks and leaving the mystery--that's pretty tough to pull off. The industrial and information ages were All About making commodities of formerly scarce things. Mystery, like privacy, is one of the notable exceptions.
