Excerpt from "Tourism, a Love Story"

The cushioned seat of the United Guides luxury tour bus slowly morphed back into it’s original shape as the massive buttocks of Sylvia Goodrich slid off and waddled down the aisle. The sudden heat of the outside caused Sylvia’s forehead, already sticky with sunscreen, to perspire even further so she swiped it with the back of her bloated palm and for a second considered climbing back onto the air-conditioned shuttle. Sylvia had never been a big fan of cattle ranches, dismissing them as sordid and depressing. At one point she had even attempted vegetarianism before the siren call of In-And-Out burger had become simply too much to resist.

However, as the rest of the patrons of the Rick Steve’s tour of Latin America filed into the faux-antique gates of La Estancia, Sylvia realized she had no choice but to follow and the complimentary cheese empanadas just inside the ranch’s gates acted only as the final bait. Sylvia ran her fingers over the silky cow hides piled six high in the gift shop but failed to read the numerous history plaques that lined the ranch’s halls. Like most tourists, Sylvia had a short attention span and was more interested in that which she could physically touch or see than the things she had to imagine. She would not have even partaken in this whirlwind tour of South America if it weren’t for a recent divorce and an ungodly amount of coercion on the part of her girlfriends. Needless to say, Sylvia was far from the adventurous type. Traveling was likely lower on her to-do list than refurnishing the guest bedroom or organizing her sock drawer. She did not even have a guest bedroom, for that matter.

As her friends lined up for complimentary horse rides, Ms. Goodrich politely declined, opting instead to take a seat under one of the many palm trees awkwardly scattered about the ranch for shade, proving that tourism had once again taken precedent over tradition. She watched as her friends Susan, also overweight, was painstakingly hoisted into the saddle of a horse that looked scrawny and sedated with boredom. “I feel your pain,” Sylvia mused, as her lazy stare met that of the horse. She wished she had stayed behind, or at the very least brought that new issue of Cosmo that was stowed in her suitcase, but as it was she just tapped her feet and waited for the cowbell to signal lunchtime.