Best Travel Partner?

Lowbrow Answer: Your Parents
Still taking exotic trips with your parents after you turned 18? Let me guess. You're a white, upper-middle class spoiled brat. Your name is something like "Daphne" or "Libby." All your trips are to famous European cities, where your family takes pasty photographs of each other in front of crumbly buildings that you're all convinced were built by hardworking medieval Italians but that were actually built by hardworking medieval slaves. Sound familiar?

Tragically, this family of yuppies was eaten by a shark just moments after this photo was taken.

There's nothing worse than traveling with your parents. They wear matching baby-blue sweatsuits to the airport, they keep their passports in those beige safety necklaces, and they insist on wearing New Balance walking shoes everywhere they go. Fucking New Balance. If Nike's motto is "Just Do It," New Balance's should be: "Eh. Who cares. You're old and boring anyway."

Middlebrow Answer: Your Significant Other
Traveling with a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a mistress or a gimp or a sissyboy twink submissive is always a blast because you get to fuck on the road. It's like an away-game for your penis. There's nothing better than having sex in a foreign country. In a hotel room, on a cruise ship, on the back of an Estonian donkey. Whatever. Sex works on the same principle as modern cinema does: it improves steadily the farther away you get from America.

"I realize my body language says otherwise, but I fucking hate you."

That said, there's no quicker way to violently end a relationship than by taking a trip together. Sweet god. One minute, you're holding hands and sipping Margaritas on the beach in Cabo, and the next, you're calling your girlfriend a dumb skank while she sobs on the phone with the airline company because you got into a car that you thought was a taxi but that was actually a fruit delivery service and now you're standing in the foothills of an active Peruvian volcano.

Highbrow Answer: Bjork
Okay, you know how the Grand Canyon is totally spectacular? The majestic rock faces. The sheer open expanse. The way the sun hits the glimmering waters of the Colorado River. Now imagine that, while you're appreciating all that beauty, Bjork is telling you a story in Icelandic about the time a dwarf stole her toothbrush and used it to build a polar bear sanctuary. Awesome, right? I know. Awesome.

Bjork and I found this rock during our burro tour of Yosemite.

Seeing the world with Bjork as your tour guide is a highbrow dream come true. You could create atonal, unlistenable music by the shores of the Caspian Sea. You could write vague, indecipherable lyrics from the top of Mount Fuji. You could discuss Matthew Barney's latest work amongst the trees of the Black Forest. I should marry her right now so that I can have all that for the rest of my life. Plus, then I'd be the Duke of Bjork. (Get it? Like the Duke of York? Fucking A, I deserve a Golden Globe for this shit.)

Best Soda?

Lowbrow Answer: Mountain Dew
I try to avoid ingesting anything whose color does not occur in nature. Although, on second thought, I think large portions of Chernobyl were neon green after the meltdown, so I guess the color of Mountain Drew isn't entirely fabricated.

I love that the marketing strategy for this stuff is four morons doing extreme sports and then telling you to "Do the Dew." "Do the Dew" sounds like something a liquid ecstasy-peddling drug dealer would advise, and do I really want to drink something that's going to make me more like the spikey-haired Arizona State dropout that's standing alone on a plateau wielding an orange mountain bike? How the hell did he get up there in the first place?


Middlebrow Answer: A&W Root Beer
Started in 1919, this root beer was originally the "house wine" of the A&W restaurant chain. It was made by hand and served on tap. Getting root beer on tap is one of those things you dream about when you're an eight-year-old kid, along with chewing 100 pieces of bubblegum at once and watching an angry dinosaur eat your school.

While it's tasty indeed, this shit is peddled by The Great Root Bear. Sorry, but anytime you humanize an animal to sell your product, you're going to lose points. What species of bear is it anyway that wears an orange sweater and cap, and is always carrying a mug of root bear? I feel like he wouldn't survive very long in Northern Alaska. Although, he's probably always warm and rarely thirsty.


Highbrow Answer: Moxie
This shit is disgusting. It's basically carbonated motor oil. Created in 1884, it's older than Coke or Pepsi and is the grandfather of all carbonated beverages. And like most highbrow things in this country, you can only really find it in New England. Ahh, good ole New England. Home to Harvard, Clam Chowda, Yale, MIT, Yankee Swaps, Robert Frost, and Moxie. Impressive, eh?

Still not convinced? Then consider the fact that Calvin Coolidge, E.B. White, and Ted Williams were all avid fans of the drink. How's THAT for celebrity sponsorship. Any drink that prides itself on the affections of an early 20th century president is definitely highbrow. I can just imagine other companies turning to historical figures for their marketing. Nike could create a line of running shoes based on Moses' travels in the desert: "Just Jew It."