A Journey To Sissonville, West Virginia, Home Of Shain Gandee And MTV’s ‘Buckwild’

by Dave Seminara on

Tourism officials are always looking for promotional hooks, and using connections to popular TV shows has long been a common way to market a destination. In the ’80s, television programs like “Miami Vice” and “Magnum P.I.” boosted tourism in South Florida and Hawaii, while “The Love Boat” was a boon for the cruise industry. More recently a well-known PR firm is pushing Connecticut’s “Mad Men” connection and the Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau is promoting “Breaking Bad” tours, despite the fact that the show’s protagonists cook meth for a living. The MTV show “Jersey Shore” boosted tourism there but officials in the Garden State were reluctant to formally promote the show given its bawdy content.

Earlier this year, MTV replaced “Jersey Shore” with a new reality show called “Buckwild” that depicts the lifestyles of hard-partying country kids from West Virginia who spend their days and nights boozing, hooking up, brawling and going “mudding” in trucks and ATV’s. Even before the show aired, politicians like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin were calling for the show to be taken off the air, arguing that it played on the public’s “ugly, inaccurate stereotypes about the people of West Virginia.”

Calls to take the show off the air have intensified in recent weeks after one cast member, Salma Amin, was arrested on heroin possession charges and another, Michael Buford, was charged with DUI. And then last week, the breakaway star of the show, Shain Gandee, was found dead in a sport utility vehicle along with his uncle and a friend after they were last seen leaving a bar at 3 a.m. According to the AP, autopsies indicated that they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, possibly caused by their truck’s tailpipe being blocked with mud.I’m not proud to admit that I watched “Buckwild” a few times and was mildly intrigued, not so much with the clearly contrived story lines or staged antics but with the rural subculture depicted and the middle of nowhere appeal of Sissonville, West Virginia, where much of the show is shot. I live in a nice suburb of Chicago, where people ride their bikes to Whole Foods and an Arts Cinema that shows depressing foreign films, so I was curious to visit a place where everyone has peculiar accents and seems to spend their time mudding or hunting in the woods.

I was driving through West Virginia last Saturday, the day before Gandee’s funeral, but my wife, who has previously indulged me, albeit grudgingly, on lengthy detours for Amish donuts, nude beaches in Greece, and a tour of Justin Bieber’s haunts, among many other things, wasn’t stoked about spending a Saturday afternoon in Sissonville.

“Is it on the way?” she asked suspiciously.

“Sort of,” I claimed, despite the fact that Sissonville is on the way to nowhere.

The town is actually only about 15 miles north of Charleston, the state capital, but unlike other larger cities, Charleston doesn’t sprawl very far, so the place feels more like a quiet, country town than a suburb. It’s a humble little place with a mix of churches, businesses, modest new homes, decrepit old ones and trailers lining Sissonville Drive, the town’s main drag. We popped into a restaurant called Topspot Country Cooking and our waitress handed us menus that boasted that their food was “good enough for President George W. Bush to eat twice.”

“President Bush ate here twice?” I asked, looking around the dated little place, which was both relatively busy and silent at the same time.

“I’m not really sure about that,” said our waitress, who said her name was Stachia. “We have a catering company too and I think he ate some food from there.”

“What about other famous people?” I asked. “Do the kids from ‘Buckwild’ eat here?”

“Oh they do,” she said. “Shain was a friend of mine, and so are Joey and Ashley, the other two kids from the show who are from Sissonville.”

I ordered a meatloaf sandwich and a slice of peanut butter pie, which were both outstanding, and Stachia pointed out the window at a passing pickup truck.

“There goes Tyler,” she said. “He’s on the show too.”

She said she liked the show but admitted that some of the crew’s antics seemed a bit staged. I asked her about Shain and she said he was a sweetheart.

“Most of the people who have come through here because they’ve seen the show ask about Shain,” she said. “We had one guy who drove here all the way from Tennessee because he wanted to go mudding with Shain. He wasn’t here that weekend but if he was, I’m sure he would’ve gone with him.”

Stachia said that her brother used to date one of the female cast members and mentioned that Ashley, one of the cast members, moved to North Carolina because some people in town harassed her after the show came out. I asked her if the cast members’ heads had swelled after their newfound fame and she said she didn’t think any of them had changed for the worse.

“Of course they’re going to change a little bit,” she said. “I mean come on, people from little old Sissonville don’t usually get to be on TV.”

But an older couple sitting next to us wasn’t as keen on the show and the infamy it has brought the town.

“I watched an episode and a half but couldn’t stand to keep going with it,” said the man, who sat on the same side of the booth as his wife. “I don’t think the kids around here act that bad in real life.”

We drove down the street towards Shain’s home, referred to as the Wolf Pen holler on the show because it’s on Wolfpen Drive, and passed Larry’s Bar, the tavern where he and his cohorts were drinking on the night they died. It’s a nondescript building with tiny little windows – a great little hideout. There was a banner with the Miller Lite logo posted outside the building, which read, “We Will Miss You – Dave, Shain and Robert.”

I drove up Wolf Pen Drive, thinking I might talk to a few of Shain’s neighbors, but I soon thought better of it. They were still grieving and it felt wrong to swing through town with a notebook and a slew of questions. But visiting his neighborhood was an eye opener. Shain’s street is lined with ramshackle dwellings, some of which seemed ready to collapse, along with a host of trailers, and some tidy, modest homes.

I know that MTV and the cast members of this show have been lambasted for supposedly giving West Virginia a bad name but after seeing the Wolf Pen, I felt like I couldn’t blame Shain and the other kids from Sissonville for doing whatever it takes to make a living. Press reports indicate that they were set to make $4,000 per episode for the show’s second season, which is now in doubt as network executives decide if the show will go on without Shain. That is awfully good money in a place like Sissonville.

The show is undoubtedly a kind of cultural pollution. One does feel a bit dumber after watching it. People tune in to laugh at the country kids from West Virginia but after seeing Sissonville in person, I can’t help but conclude that the local kids who made it onto the show are smarter than they might appear.

[Photo credits: Dave Seminara, MTV]

Video Of The Day: New York City In 3 Words

by Elizabeth Seward on

“3 words for NYC” from Cokau on Vimeo.

New York City might be polarizing in that love/hate kind of way, but in the end, the reasons to love the city seem limitless. One could use thousands of words to describe what’s to love about NYC, but the more difficult thing to do is to break the appeal of New York down into just three words. Vimeo user Cokau (which represents filmmakers Achille Coquerel and Thomas Kauffmann) asked New Yorkers to describe what they love about the city in just three words and the resulting footage has made this cool video titled “3 Words For NYC.” It’s worth the watch.

No Bones About The Wonders Of Vézelay

by David Downie on

Once upon a time, in the days of gluttonous yore – the 1980s – the celebrated Burgundian hill town of Vézelay, crowned by the Basilica of Mary Magdalene, was known as “a site of gastronomic pilgrimage.” Rarely did anyone evoke Magdalene’s relics or her UNESCO World Heritage Site shrine. Rarely did gastronomes notice the strangely attired pilgrims trudging up the looping, lichen-frosted lanes to venerate the longhaired, wild-woman saint.

In the 1980s, pilgrimage wasn’t in fashion. Hedonism seemed the thing. The Michelin-starred hotel-restaurant in crusty Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay at the saint’s feet was the shrine. Thousands offered up wallets on the altar of haute cuisine. Only zealots spoke of the moldering bones inside the basilica’s gilt reliquary.

Now nearly 2 million visitors climb the cobbled streets of upper Vézelay. This medieval aerie hovers above vineyards and those emerald-green pastures where romantic writers writhe in ecstasy. Legions of the pious brandish staffs, scallop shells and other tokens of religiosity. They besiege the ramparts, starting at Easter, the kick-off date for pilgrimages in France. Culture vultures, busloads of package tourists and brightly attired trekkers join the scrum.

Saint Bernard preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay on Easter day, 1146. It happened on March 31, like this year, a reason for numerological pilgrims to rejoice. It might also explain the numbers of visitors in Vézelay when I was there a few days ago.

Confession time: I’m not religious and am only partly reformed. I admit Vézelay was where my wife Alison and I started our trek: it lasted nearly three months and took us across France and over the Pyrenees. Vézelay surprised me then for the changes that have transformed it. This time around the upper part of town looked like a cross between Mont Saint Michel-France’s most visited site – and Montmartre. The formula is familiar: elephant trains, souvenirs, iffy food and parking lots packed with garishly painted buses.

What to do? Montmartre is wondrous at dawn. At Mont Saint Michel and Vézelay the trick is to spend the night. When the buses roll away, the magic steals back. It lasts until mid-morning.

We did not stay up all night. Arriving at dusk, we checked into an old favorite: the Hotel de la Poste et du Lion d’Or. Then we strolled up the storied streets. The crowds were headed out.

Spit-polished for the trade, the village still has a “real” side. We followed locals to a street paralleling the main drag, Grande Rue. The last day-trippers filled the wine bars, cafés and crêperies sampling the Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, the cappuccinos and Burgundy treats.

The residents roosted in the PMU-tobacco shop, knocking back an 80-proof distillate called marc de Bourgogne. They also wagered on pari-mutuel horse races, and watched with puzzlement as the neo-pilgrims vanished into the night.

Vézelay’s tourist office calls the basilica of Mary Magdalene “an extraordinary book of stone and light.” Beyond the troubled translation, the Romanesque shrine does seem to have been rewritten by ten centuries of heavy weather, lightning and strife. The façade definitely looks better when spotlit at night.

Over the doors three tympanums crawled with figures. The almond-shaped center one showed Christ surrounded by Apostles and strange beings ready for induction into the Universal Church. Giants and pygmies, dog-headed men and others with huge ears: the message was clear. All are welcome-sinners, miscreants like me, pagans, heathens and creatures only part human. This is Mary Magdalene’s basilica. She had been a prostitute.

It dawned on me why Vézelay’s central tympanum should resemble an almond or vulva. Hadn’t Mary’s first profession depended on the forbidden fruit? The cult of the Virgin, virginity, chastity and abstinence had come late to the church, ditto the rule against married priests, and women in the clergy. The reformed party boy Saint Francis of Assisi had come to Vézelay in its heyday. Maybe it was time for jocular Pope Francis to make a pilgrimage into the future by rediscovering the past?

Miracles happen, we’re assured.

The nave, daubed with dusky light, stretched a football field long. Having walked 750 miles, seeing a thousand churches en route, I now thought the nave looked vaguely Moorish. Its vaults and arches are rimmed by alternating pale and reddish stone, as in better mosques in Spain. Blasphemy?

The demons and monsters torturing sinners on the basilica’s carved capitals seemed to me to prove that progress is possible after all. In some places, notably France, the grin has overwhelmed the grim.

We were overdue for hedonistic relief. A girl in the hotel’s dining room was dressed like an Easter egg, lost in her Louis XV-style chair. She rose up and announced that the snails were “good and garlicky.” This prodigy then consumed a large pork jowl and several potatoes – as did I – savored ripe, smelly Epoisse cheese and gobbled a giant chocolate dessert. The child was a French paradox in the making. Healthy hedonism was alive and well in Vézelay. There was hope. Maybe miracles happen after all.

Author and private tour guide David Downie’s latest critically acclaimed books are Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James and Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light, soon to be an audiobook. His Paris Time Line app will be published in April: www.davidddownie.com and www.parisparistours.com. Photos © 2013 Alison Harris

A Personal Lament To The Death Of Guidebooks

by Meg Nesterov on

It was with a heavy heart that I read the news last week that Frommer’s guidebooks will cease to be printed. The guidebooks were purchased by Google last summer, and as of this year, the entire future list of titles will not be released. With the takeover of digital apps, social media, and user-generated content, we knew this was coming, but it still feels like the end of an era. It’s become fashionable for any traveler (especially for writers, including our own bloggers) to be dismissive of the printed guidebook, claiming they get all their tips “from locals on the road” or via social networks, possibly demurring to an occasional read of Lonely Planet. Let’s dispense with the tired traveler vs. tourist argument; we can all benefit from practical info for navigating a new place, and no matter how “local” you go, there’s nothing wrong with visiting the museums and attractions for which a destination is known. Even as an active member of the “new media,” I mourn the death of guidebooks like that of a friend.

The greatest gift of the digital age to the traveler is online trip planning. I’d never want to go back to the days of travel agents and phone reservations. I’ve spent hours on the Internet booking flights, reading hotel reviews and soliciting advice and recommendations from friends, but guidebooks have always been the heart of my pre-travel ritual. Each year, after we had narrowed down the destinations to a few (often places where American Airlines and Marriott coincided, back in the days where work travel generated a fair amount of status, miles and points for free vacations), my husband and I would spend a few hours at a bookstore, poring over the guidebooks for points of interest, relative costs of travel and local events that might happen during our travel dates. Back when I worked at Conde Nast Traveler magazine, my desk was next to the research department, making me feel like a kid in a candy store. Shelf after shelf of guidebooks, atlases and travelogues gave me a keen eye for what features are the most useful in a printed travel companion.In addition to having the most current information, I look for an efficient presentation (while I love travel photography, I don’t care for it in my guidebooks, taking up valuable real estate and showing me things I hope to see myself) with detailed maps, a short phrasebook and menu guide, as well as a point of view in a guidebook. I had always made fun of Rick Steves and his fanny-packed followers, but in Portugal, I discovered his “back door style” is really quite helpful for navigating crowded tourist attractions and distilling fun facts about a museum’s history (look elsewhere for nightlife advice, though). My respect for Mr. Steves solidified with his book “Travel As A Political Act,” particularly due to his advocacy for travel to Muslim countries and the importance of getting a passport. Time Out city guides offer a surprising depth of cultural sidebars in addition to nightlife listings. Occasionally, you might be lucky to stumble upon an indie series like the gorgeously-designed Love Guides to India or Herb Lester‘s guides to the “usual and unusual” in Europe and the U.S., but these were often only discovered once you reached your destination. Lonely Planet was usually a given, having the widest range of places and most annual updates, but my heart belonged to Arthur Frommer.

Frommer’s guides were never the hippest or most inventive, but I liked their no-nonsense and concise layout, stable of local writers and the personality that shown through the pages with “Overrated” tags and honest advice. I loved the history behind the Frommer’s brand, imagining how Arthur’s original “Europe on $5 a Day” changed the way Americans travel and opened up a world of travel daydreaming and practical trip planning. Writer Doug Mack recently published his own book, “Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day” using Frommer’s 1963 book as his only guide. Vintage guidebooks are priceless slices of the past, whether it’s a reissued Victorian guide, or a handbook for your trip to the USSR (the later is now one of my prized possessions). In 50 years, what will people learn about how we traveled to Asia from Facebook photo albums and TripAdvisor reviews?

Destination and books chosen, I relished my New York commute armed with guidebooks before the trip. While I hated to ever brandish a guidebook while traveling, I didn’t mind being seen with it on the subway, where people might see me and think, “There’s a girl who’s going places! Literally, to Chile!” I imagined a stranger might strike up a conversation, offering their tips for their aunt’s restaurant in Santiago or their best friend’s guesthouse in Valparaiso (I was evidently envisioning a live version of Twitter). Even now that I do float travel questions over social media, I first try to research via a custom Google search that limits results to my trusted sources, ranging from travel writer friends’ blogs to big media like New York Times’ travel section and, of course, Frommers.com.

During a trip, I’d carry a book in my purse during the day, but I only removed it for surreptitious glimpses of a map if seriously lost. While in a museum, I might allow myself the luxury of reading the book in full public view. In the evenings, I might peruse the book before dinner, not for restaurant recommendations, but for hints on what neighborhoods and streets might yield the most options. My husband has always loathed making reservations, even in our own city, preferring to rely on instinct, menu/curb appeal and highest density of locals. At the end of the night, I liked going back to read more about the places we’d seen, learning about the backstories of a city, and understanding the cultural importance of the names we saw on statues.

Once I moved abroad to Istanbul in 2010 and constantly clutched a smartphone, my guidebook usage slowed, but I never fully gave it up. English books were expensive and travel plans were made much more freely (weekend in Budapest on Friday? Why not, when it’s a two-hour flight?), but I still tried to cobble together some basic info before going to a new country – stuff like: how much to tip, the best way to get to the airport and the going cost of a bottle of local wine. Basically, stuff that could be found in a guidebook. In many eastern European countries, I found the excellent (and free) In Your Pocket guides, produced by expats and natives, with tips on everything from happy hours to hidden Soviet murals. The guides are available in various digital forms, but I always preferred to find a paper copy, easy to roll up in a purse and read cover-to-cover like a magazine. I experimented with various Kindle books and documents and apps to collect the many links and tips I found before a trip, but found a lot of limitations: poor maps, advice from inexperienced travelers, lack of context and real “meaty” content. Especially when I was stuck with a lack of Wi-Fi, a dead battery or a setting where it would be unwise to flash any form of technology, I’d yearn for an old-fashioned book.

After I return home, I can’t say exactly what happens to my guidebooks. I don’t revisit places often, so I tend to pass on books to other travelers, leave them in airplane seat pockets, or recycle them when I have to purge books. I always liked the idea of keeping them on my bookshelf, a visual reminder of where we’d been, like passport stamps in your living room, but my shelf space can’t keep up with my wanderlust. Many travelers like a printed book so they can make notes and annotations in the margins, but I consider a book a sacred space to be left pristine, though my books are accessorized with receipts, ticket stubs and bar napkins. I keep these artifacts in duty-free bags and hotel envelopes, possibly for a scrapbook I will never make, or for future generations to marvel at the fact that we once paid for hotel Wi-Fi.

Now that we’ve reached the end of an era, what’s to come in the next? Now that anyone with an Internet connection can tap into a local network, or crowdsource restaurant recommendations, is Mr. Frommer and his ilk destined to become a relic of travel, like steamer trunks and airplane ashtrays? I’d say that until apps and social media can overcome the limitations of user-generated content, there’s a niche for printed guidebooks, but the choice of print over digital is more visceral. We need guidebooks as long as there are people who love browsing in bookstores, who appreciate a beautiful map, and who don’t give a damn about being a traveler or a tourist, as long as they are going somewhere.

[Photo credit: Gluten Free Mrs. D via Twitter]

Galley Gossip: The Worst, Funniest and Most Common Bad Airline Passengers

by Heather Poole on
Photo credit: Telstar Logistics

From time to time I get asked questions about bad passengers. I thought I’d share a few of them here.

What’s the worst passenger behavior you’ve witnessed?

I’ve caught passengers taking other people’s luggage out of the bin to make room for their own bags. I’m not joking. They’ll pull out a bag, drop it on the floor and walk away leaving it in the middle of the aisle for the passengers behind them to crawl over. Have you ever tried stepping over a 21-inch Rollaboard? Not easy. Happened three times last month!

The funniest?

Recently a woman tried to stow her suitcase in that, oh, what do you call that spot? Crevice? Crack? Between the overhead bin and the ceiling? There’s like a millimeter of space there! I don’t care which airline you’re traveling on, that’s not going to fit. Then there are the recliners and the anti-recliners. One anti-recliner got upset at a recliner because she couldn’t get her tray table down. I suggested if maybe she removed the gigantic fanny pack from around her waist it might go down. She looked at me like I was the crazy one! One man actually called me over because the passenger in front of him had reclined his seat. I had to point out that, uh … his seat was reclined too!

What’s the most common bad passenger behavior you’ve seen?

These days, people are so self-absorbed multitasking as they board a flight they don’t even say hello to the flight attendant greeting them at the boarding door. They’re too busy talking on the phone, typing on their laptops, listening to music and texting as they walk down the aisle to notice their backpacks and duffle bags are whacking people in the head. Recently a passenger got mad at me – ME! – because I wouldn’t help him lift a heavy bag. That’s because he couldn’t get off the phone to improve his one arm bag swing. Two arms always work better than one when it comes to getting those bags into the overhead bins.

What are the rules for dealing with bad passengers?

We can’t call the police or the fire department at 30,000 feet. That’s why it’s a good idea to take care of problem passengers on the ground before we depart. Before we kick someone off the plane, we’ll do everything we can to make a bad situation good again. Usually, it involves doing the following:

  1. Getting Down: Literally, we get down on one knee in the aisle at the passenger’s level. This position is less threatening to passengers.
  2. Listening: Most passengers just want to be heard. That’s it.
  3. Keeping Calm: We try not to raise our voices. Staying calm and in control will diffuse most situations.
  4. The Facts: We might ask what the problem is and then have the passenger suggest a solution. This way we’re all on the same page.
  5. Walking Away: A new face is new energy. If I’m not getting anywhere with a difficult passenger, I’ll remove myself from the situation and ask a coworker to step in. Even though a coworker may tell the passenger the exact same thing I did, they could get a completely different response.

If that doesn’t work, and we’re in flight, we might issue a written warning signed by the Captain. All this means is if a passenger doesn’t stop doing whatever it is they were doing, authorities will be called to meet the flight. That’s why I say if you’re going to freak out, might be a good idea to wait until we’re safe and sound on the ground and parked at the gate. No one wants to divert a flight. Plus you don’t want to end up in jail far away from home where no one can rescue you.