They say to never meet your heroes, an adage which today’s prescription-inducing media barrage seems perversely committed to reinforcing. But long before it became morally bankrupt to recount your favorite Louis CK bit or R. Kelly song, the saying was intended as a buffer against likely disappointment. Your heroes are human beings, and to meet them is to be confronted with their very human fallibility, lack of polish, and, yes, potential monstrosity. But hero worship in the travel world works differently. After all, travel nerds don’t grow up with posters of The Points Guy on our bedroom walls. Our heroes are places, not people. They are shaped by oceans, not Netflix specials. They drop jaws, not albums. They sit on the throne of history, not the defendant’s table.
This isn’t to say travel destinations are fully exempt from the Cosby effect. Anyone conflicted with the ethical complexities of visiting, and therefore supporting, places like Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, The Philippines or the United States can tell you that. This also isn’t to suggest that travelers don’t consider the human element when giving their dream locations the pedestal treatment, as anyone who yearns for famous Greek hospitality, or Irish Pub banter, or Dutch aloofness can attest to. The point here is that adoration is inherently different for travel heroes and corporeal ones. Which begs the question implied by this post’s opening maxim: Does meeting your travel icons open you up to the possibility of a crushing confrontation with their imperfection?
Silly and illogical as it seems, this was on my (David’s) mind as The Megatrip inched its passport-stamped feet closer to Petra, the Jordanian lost city that has occupied the George Washington position in my travel Mt. Rushmore ever since I watched Indiana Jones choose wisely within its rose-red confines at age 7. Before I ever spent any nights on airport benches, before a previous excursion was cancelled to avoid some pesky terrorists, before this life-consuming travel habit even dug its trans-continental talons into my suggestible psyche, there was Petra. Mysterious, foreboding, inscrutable, singular, and yes, heroic. It couldn’t possibly approach the Speilbergian bar nestled in the upper reaches of my meager brain box since childhood, could it? There’s no way all of those Instagram shots I’ve double tapped over the years weren’t filtered to the point of animated artifice, is there? The real site has to be a pile of rocks next to an IHOP parking lot, doesn’t it?
These were the questions I was asking myself the night Sara and I progressed through the lantern-illuminated canyon leading up to Petra’s iconic Treasury for our first face-to-face meeting with an all-time travel legend. I thought of a number of possibilities for how I would react to first seeing my hero in the ancient, rocky flesh. I could be overcome with beauty to the point of collapsing into a pathetic, weeping, and likely sweaty, ball in the sand. I could receive an unordered fishbowl of Disappointment Daiquiri with an extra dash of “It Looked Bigger In The Pictures” bitters. Or there could be an unforeseen external factor that could somehow throttle my appreciation, like a crying child, or a smelly child, or an adult child.
So that night when the ember-esque walls of the Siq widened enough for the Treasury to fully reveal itself, shrouded in shadow and auburn glow (truly one of the greatest grand entrances in the world), perhaps what was most surprising was my lack of reaction. There it was, flickering in candlelight, looming stoic over the small congregation of travel pilgrims, and in the moment of my first IRL confrontation with my travel hero, I did maybe the most predicable thing you can do when meeting a celebrity. I took a picture. And then another, and then several thousand others. No tears of joy, no deflated dreams, just a whole lot of documenting. Which, looking back, actually makes a lot of sense. Picture-taking is my default travel setting after all. So when confronted with anticipation and fantasy fruition of this magnitude it’s appropriate that I reverted to my most instinctual, knee-jerk behaviors. If I had started talking way too loud or making jokes I’d later regret (like I will toward the end of this post), it would have been just about as predictable.
With the initial introduction completed, I was in somewhat of a stupor, conscious of the epicness of what I’d just seen but unsure of how it compared to my stratospheric expectations, or if it even mattered, or if I even cared. Fortunately, those cloudy uncertainties would soon be clarified, because that night was but a passing introduction, a handshake at a crowded party, a business card exchange. Now it was time to really get to know one another. And the following morning would begin one of the greatest single travel days Sara and I have ever experienced. We spent 10 hours in Petra. We walked 14 miles. 
We clambered up every ancient staircase, dodging indifferent donkeys and daring ourselves to look down at each directional about face. We marveled at every architectural masterwork sprouting spore-like from their symbiotic mountains of stone. We gawked at every hallucinatory tomb interior, the visual history of water, wind and earth, transformed into vibrant, psychedelic wallpaper. We sipped tea in every precipice-perched blanket fort. We feasted on unidentified flavor-goos, flanked by antiquity on all sides. We were like children. Like explorers. Like Jonses. Like heroes.
So in the grand scheme of idol to fanboy meetings, it’s safe to say Petra threw me its middle-eastern Steelers jersey in the tunnel before going back to the locker room. Was there an element of self-fulfilling prophecy here? Was I so enraptured by Petra for so long that it could do nothing but fulfill my wildest dreams? Some kind of Travel Blognitive Dissonance if you will? Sure, maybe. But I’d rather be a passport half full kind of guy.
Because what really blew me away about Petra was how it continued to impress long after the postcard-perfect Treasury had its marquee moment. The more I got to know my hero the more I found to obsess about it. Like watching a movie for the second time and noticing things only someone who’d seen the ending could appreciate. Or like hearing a great song on the radio and realizing the entire album is white hot fire.
If you’re planning to meet your travel icon, my advice would be to learn as much as possible. If your wandercrush only deepens the more information you acquire on your hero location, you are more likely to be satisfied by your inevitable introduction. Don’t let the adulation cloud your judgment. If your dream countryside village is off the radar for most tourists it could mean it’s an untouched gem, or it could mean there really isn’t much to see. If all the photos of your fantasy beach are taken from the same angle, it could mean that it’s the most stunning shot around, or it could mean it’s the only perspective that avoids the enormous cruise terminal and the gargling sewage drain immediately out of frame. 
Travel heroes are not the same as our human ones, but to avoid a case of Legend Letdown, maybe we should treat them like they are. Learn every lyric. Memorize every line. Condemn them if they masturbate in front of another wonder of the ancient world (dammit…). But see them. For the love of God see them. Because perhaps the most important distinction between our living heroes and the ones on our maps, is that only one of them really insists, enduringly across oceans and languages and lifetimes, that you encounter them in-person to truly understand them.
