Travel time? Settle for kinda-good

When you’re traveling, ii seems, you might settle for sorta-good.
Things are rarely perfect. In his second season of “The Reluctant Traveler” (which starts March 8 on Apple TV+), Eugene Levy found:
— An island hotel at the northern edge of Germany. The setting was “absolutely gorgeous,”he told the Television Critics Association, but there was a wellness theme. “You couldn’t get a cup of coffee there. You couldn’t get a glass of wine. You have to fast for three days.”
— A Swedish town (shown here), filled with cute buildings, sweet people and “mosquitoes – like a lot of mosquitoes. Like, it was a very thick season for mosquitoes.”
David Brindley, the show’s producer, added helpfully: “There are 47 different types of mosquito in Sweden. I think Eugene encountered them all in the first 24 hours.”
Viewers can see that right away. Taking a northward trek through Europe, the show plans to start the season with two episodes, in Sweden and Scotland.
“My affection for (the Swedes) grew almost instantaneously, when this Midsummer Festival was taking place,” Levy said.
Everything was set, including a maypole, bright costumes and high spirits.
“And then it poured,” Levy said. “And it just poured …. They’re drenched, and you would never know anything was wrong.”
There was a childhood feeling to it all, he said. “Basically, you’re playing in the rain.”
And it’s a reminder that Levy, 77, who has always been reluctant to travel, sort of likes it. “I’m loving the show for what it’s actually doing for me … making me a kind of a more enlightened person, and possibly a more interesting person.”
His wife has been pleasantly surprised to see him actually talk with strangers, he said.“I’m usually not a chit-chatty person.”
Still, he’s not one of the those folks who likes everything and eats anything.
There was the time in France, Brindley said, when Levy tried his fiirst oyster. “Ii stayed in his mouth, I think he says in the episode, for the longest half-second of his life.” .
And there was haggis, which, Levy said, is “a horrible thing. It’s every part of an animal’s body that you would not want in a recipe.”
But iit’s big in Scotland, his mother’s homeland. She had Polish Jewish roots, but was born in Glasgow and moved to Canada at 12, rarely talked about her homeland.
“She grew up in a kind of a three-room apartment …. She had nine brothers and sisters, parents and a boarder,” he said.
It was a sobering visit, but Levy also found joy and something familiar:
“The droll, dry sense of humor, I definitely felt there …. My mom and her brothers and sisters all had a very dry – and now, I (see), very, very Scottish kind of sense of humor.”
It’s a kind of humor, that – mixed with Jewish and Canadian wit – has propelled him for generations.