5.29.2026 – when you travel you

when you travel … you
have adventures, to tourists …
time is valuable

Adding experiences in Georgia and Virginia and the Carolinas to their knowledge of Florida, the Johnsons saw and drank deep of Savannah, Charleston, Asheville, Richmond, and Newport News.

They were able to do all five cities in six days, while the Bezuzuses had taken eight for them.

In Charleston they saw Calhoun’s grave and learned all about the aristocratic society.

They were so pleasantly entertained there, by a very prominent and successful business acquaintance of Mr. Johnson’s, a Mr. Max Rosenfleisch of New York, who had bought a fine old Southern mansion in Charleston and thus, of course, was right in with all the old families socially.

Mr. Rosenfleisch said he liked the aristocrats, but was going to change a lot of their old-fashioned social ways, and show them how to have a real swell time, with cabarets and theater parties, instead of these slow dances, and teach them to dine at seven instead of three or four.

The Johnsons were quite thrilled at witnessing the start of this social revolution—I tell you, it’s when you travel that you have such unusual adventures.

They themselves would actually have met some of the inner social set of Charleston, but Mr. Rosenfleisch was having the den redecorated before giving any more of his smart, exclusive parties, and meantime the Johnsons had to be getting on—to a tourist, time is valuable.

Adapted from I’m a Stranger Here Myself as reprinted in I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories by Sinclair Lewis (Dell, New York, 1962).