Road Swing: One Fan's Journey into the Soul of American Sports     T A B L E_T A L K Getting laid in foreign lands: Is it always a bad idea, or simply a way to deepen the cultural experience. Weigh in on sex and travel in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk   R E C E N T L Y Christmas in Germany By Deanna Hodgin A family visit to Nuremberg's Christkindlesmarkt turns into a lesson for adults and children alike (12/17/98) Brahmaputra: Tales From the River By Tiziana and Gianni Baldizzone Extraordinary photographs portray a mighty river's journey through Tibet, India and Bangladesh (12/16/98) The yuckiest food in the Amazon By Mary Roach What tastes even worse than rodent knee and saliva-flavored manioc mash? (12/15/98) Ryoanji reflections By Don George At a Kyoto temple, a simple plot of sand, rocks and moss makes visitors stop -- and see (12/14/98) Dirty laundry By Tanya Shaffer A simple request forces a Western woman to face her prejudices (12/11/98)   Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives     Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		__I F__Y O U__F I L M__I T, _____________they will come A passionate sports fan begins his cross-country pilgrimage with a visit to Iowa's Field of Dreams.   [ E X C E R P T ] ROAD SWING BY STEVE RUSHIN DOUBLEDAY BOOKS, 246 PAGES BY STEVE RUSHIN | A sign said that this ribbon of road had been adopted by the Women of Tomorrow. How oddly uplifting, I thought, that a group of preoperative transsexuals should find time to clean up the interstate highway system. The notion left me feeling strangely proud to be an American as I pulled off the highway for a late lunch in Austin, Minnesota, which exports to the world a uniquely American product of its own. HORMEL FOODS hollered a large billboard in town. Where Good Friends Make Good Food. Never mind that this "good food" consists principally of Spam, the processed porklike substance whose name is an apparent contraction of "Spoiled ham." The locals were proud nonetheless. The streets of Spam Town USA -- another billboard -- were littered with a dyslexia of large plastic letters blown free from movie-theater and fast-food marquees. It looked as if God had barfed Alpha-Bits on Austin. I had come here hoping to catch the city's celebrated Spam Jam. Held over three days each July, the Spam Jam is what the Olympics would be if Olympians used Hormel products instead of sporting goods. It is a capital idea and one that works remarkably well. A can of Dinty Moore beef stew, for instance, is roughly the same size and weight as a shotput shot, if not nearly as flavorful. But it wasn't meant to be. A poster in a bank window informed me that the extravaganza came and went just last week, climaxing with a three-mile Spam Walk for Health. But I could still catch the Chimilewski Polka Band at the street fair on Thursday night. Marvelous. I could feel time receding already -- to a simpler, more delusional era when Spam was synonymous with good health and polka music was not yet an oxymoron. Buoyed by the thought, I left Austin after lunch, hope and Spamburger lodged in my heart. I steered south, toward Iowa and a landscape as flat as ballpark beer. Every 20 miles I passed through some tiny town, each one time-warped and almost too picturesque. The businesses all had names like Koster's Kar Korner, Kountry Kinfolk, Kum 'N' Go, and Kopper Kettle Kafe. With each mile, my pulse quickened. And is it any wonder? I was making for a cornfield near tiny Dyersville, Iowa. I was on my way to the Field of Dreams. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - It was clearly a place with curative powers, a Medjugorge of the Middle West. Six years after the film "Field of Dreams" was released, the movie's principal shooting location -- a ballfield cut into a cornfield -- continued to draw 500 visitors every summer day. The figure is astonishing, because Dyersville is centrally located in the middle of nowhere. Townsfolk have to drive 175 miles just to get to Des Moines. This is the municipal equivalent of the man who is so sick that he'd have to rally just to die. And still they came, 20,000 tourists annually, tripling the town's population daily. What's more, they arrived from all over the world, bursting through the front door of the Dyersville tourism office and asking, "Wo ist die Fieldofdreamz?" Really. In any language, "it's the number-one question we get," confirmed the town's tourism director, Julie K. Frye, whose name was carved magnificently from a single piece of driftwood on her desk. "Right after 'Do you have a bathroom?'" Frankly, I was worried that Dyersville would be a bathroom, a tourist-choked toilet. But its streets were still storm-slick when I arrived in early evening -- the town was gleaming in the gloaming -- and the people were all so solicitous that I instantly felt like a heel for having doubted them. "Did you know," Frye had asked me, "that ghosts walk out of the corn every Sunday to play ball with fans at the field?" "Real ghosts?" "No," she said. "Just locals with regular jobs and stuff. But I was talking to one of them last week, and he said that he's never met a rude person out there. Everyone at the Field of Dreams is so nice." Indeed, the last entry in the guest book on her desk was signed. "The Fravert Family of Loyal, Wisconsin," and I couldn't help but think -- the Fraverts of Loyal, they sounded so ... nice. N E X T+P A G E | They're trying to kill me with food!