Column: California shows the way in enforced tourism

I've recently been gallivanting about as a tourist in my own back yard, one of my favorite ways of spending a vacation.

With some relatives in town, including a 7-year-old, it was a chance to visit some of the usual haunts as well as try out some new ones.

Little did I know, however, that it apparently is now state law in California that out-of-state visitors must be tourists.

It's so hard to keep up on California laws, anyway, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that they slipped one by me. And I'm not sure how they enforce it, because I visit South Lake Tahoe fairly regularly on both business and pleasure and nobody has every pulled me over and demanded that I show proof that I was enjoying California, recreating there and, presumably, spending money on trinkets and geegaws.

But I seldom travel Interstate 80, so I was unaware that they have changed the Agriculture Inspection Station to a Tourist Inspection Station.

There we were motoring along on our way to Nevada City when we approached the inspection station. My relatives are from Illinois, so they assumed it was a toll booth.

In Chicago, it sometimes seems you can't drive for more than a mile without stopping to drop some change in a basket so that they can continue to employ all those guys in orange vests standing alongside the highway holding up shovels. I've sometimes thought it was more efficient, in a method used at some intersections in the poorer sections of Chicago, for the guys to walk up to your car window and ask for change themselves.

Anyway, I assured my relatives that this was not a toll booth. It was the Agriculture Inspection Station.

In the old days, they used to ask if you were smuggling any blighted avocados into California, or perhaps were carrying wine with a screw-off cap, or had a bottle of V8 whose freshness date had expired.

I always assumed these road checks were intended to protect their fruits from our fruits. Times have changed, though, and I expect it is now considered a form of discrimination to stop a car full of people and ask, "Do you have any fruits in there?"

Certainly, that may have led to some rather frank and unexpected discussions among the passengers.

As I say, times have changed.

On Monday, at least, the uniformed troops manning the booths at the California state line were handing out Ramada Inn travel maps to the Golden State.

Being a polite driver - and, in fact, a tourist for the day - I thanked the nice man and resumed our teeth-rattling drive along Interstate 80. (I figure they keep I-80's pavement in that condition to make sure everyone in the car stays awake in order to enjoy the scenery.)

It was only later that I considered the audacity of waylaying every motorist along a major interstate highway in order to hand out some advertising.

I suppose it's possible that quite a few people are entering California without a map and without any idea of their destination, and so it's quite helpful to have a full-color tourist map showing them where they might find every Ramada Inn on the West Coast.

The first thing that happened is that my wife, who was riding in the back seat, unfolded the large map and temporarily obscured my view of a semi-trailer truck bearing down on us at 75 mph. I gently appealed to her to put the damn thing away before we were all killed. She graciously complied.

The second thing that happened vis-a-vis the map was that I threw it into the garbage when we got home.

I might have forgotten the matter entirely, except that it reminded me how I once participated in an even more obtrusive form of forced tourism.

As a reporter, I was a willing participant in scheme by the Colorado State Patrol to stop a family from Iowa and designate them as Tourists of the Day.

Fortunately, the state trooper didn't pull over an armed drug dealer and his family. That might have turned into something quite different from the image the State Patrol was trying to convey, which was "we're here to serve and protect, not necessarily get into a shootout over that bag of meth in the trunk."

So the family from Iowa was pulled over. Dad was quite relieved to find out he hadn't violated some obscure Colorado law, other than the one that says people driving cars with Iowa plates are potential victims of a public relations ploy.

I still remember the picture I took of the family after they'd been told they had won some marvelous gifts and free accommodations (I don't think it was at Ramada Inn, but it could have been) as the Tourists of the Day. You've heard the expression "deer in the headlights"? Imagine four deer wearing Bermuda shorts with cameras hanging around their necks. I think you get the idea.

We all got a good laugh at the photo, and it made for a cute story for the newspaper that day. The folks from Iowa had a good story to tell when they got back home.

My point is that Nevada does nothing that I'm aware of to make sure tourists realize they're tourists and loved by one and all for each nickel they may drop in a slot machine and each funny T-shirt they charge on their MasterCard.

At least, not out on the open highway. By uniformed state employees.

And that, I think, is one more reason we live in Nevada.

Barry Smith is managing editor of the Nevada Appeal.