Fake.

August 12, Frankenmuth.

I didn't see much of Frankenmuth, to be honest.
But the publicity surrounding the town reminded me of Solvang, in California, which we played with Circus Chimera: another tourist town built on nothing else than its foreign-sounding name and implied ethnic charm, the whole thing in fact boiling down to downtown storefront buildings that look like a bad movie set and overpriced trinkets. Solvang was supposedly fashioned after Sweden, Frankenmuth is after Bavaria.
As John Moss said, there is something wrong about tourism for tourism's sake. It's all right to have shops around Mount Rushmore, for example, but what does Solvang, or Frankenmuth, have other than its claim to be a tourist attraction itself? Hundreds of villages and towns across the nation are more attractive, if only because they are authentic.
So this: fake for fake's sake, shallow and falsely cute to make a buck (I'll take the queen of fake, Los Angeles, any day because it is inherent in its fabric, not a poorly pasted afterthought.) Worse still when you think about all the natural beauty and man-made wonders of this country.