I had no idea he was going to win. It never even crossed my mind.

My friend, Picton resident Rick Szabo, was a contestant on a reality TV show, NBC’s Destination X, which started streaming earlier this summer.

He and his wife, Sonya, gathered a group of friends every Tuesday night for the past ten weeks at The Regent, which big-screened the weekly episodes, taped over 30 days last September.

It is true that as the weeks rolled along, he was emerging, against all the reality TV-show odds, as an unlikely hero.

Rick, who leans just slightly toward rumpled, is in his mid-fifties. He was surrounded on the show by 20- and 30-somethings, many of whom were celebrities from reality shows, like The Bachelor and Love Island.

“I was going for the friendly Dad role,” he says. “That trusted uncle everyone confided in.”

But he soon found his life experience, starting with his many occupations, from finance to running a restaurant — Rick and Sonya used to own the Vic Cafe on Picton Main Street — had taught him that one can play many roles, even on one game show.

Set in Europe, each week the show brings its dwindling numbers of contestants to a different glamorous European location. Paris. Venice. The Swiss Alps. There is only one hitch. They have no idea where they are.

Equipped with remote-controlled, high-tech blindfolds, which went from dark to light on command, the show’s contestants travelled across Europe on a tour bus with blackened windows.

“Whenever we were on the bus, we had no idea where we were going. How long it would take. Nothing.”

Only the show’s producers could decide when and what they were allowed to see.

“We were absolutely at their mercy. Filming was 30 days straight. Where we ate, slept, what we did, was completely out of our hands. We had no phones, no computers. It was total immersion.”

Unlikely Hero

So how did Picton’s Rick, who in real life is something called a “birding influencer,” find himself on a reality TV show surrounded by beautiful young people — never mind go right to the end, the last man standing?

It started in 2023, when he decided to devote himself to a passion he had been cultivating, along with his family, for years: birdwatching. He created a business, Birding with Rick, and set about creating content for Instagram posts about how to identify birds, where to find them, what equipment to use.

His account quickly took off, gaining 100,000 followers in just three months. “It turned out I was the only person doing this on social media. It just met a need.”

Birdwatching is part of the zeitgeist. In the past five years it has gone from being something like stamp collecting — an eccentric pastime for the solitary and possibly strange — to something with cultural cachet. As anyone who watched The Residence can tell you, people with character, charisma, discernment, and acumen turn to birdwatching in their spare time.

During the Covid pandemic, millions across North America — Rick estimates 40 million Americans are birdwatching — wanted to get out of the house, and connect with nature.

“It’s a form of adventure. It invites you into the natural world as an explorer. Birds open the world up for you.”

He quickly found himself with advertisers, hired to lead birdwatching tours, and, increasingly, invited around the world. In the past year he has travelled to Saskatchewan, Colorado, and Vietnam, to film destination marketing pitched at birders and travellers alike.

Within a year, NBC’s talent scouts had spotted “The Bird Man” — Rick is now the No. 1 birding influencer in North America — and invited him onto the show.

But he revealed none of this to his competitors.

“I didn’t want them to know that I had travelled all over the world already, that I either knew exactly where we were most of the time, or could quickly figure it out. While they were looking for clues, often enough, I’d be looking for the birds.”

In one early episode, the contestants knew they were in France but had no idea whether in Cannes or Paris. During a brief foray outside, Rick noted he did not see a single seaside bird, no gulls, no terns. But he heard a dove calling, a Eurasian collared dove, to be exact. “That said Paris, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

Double Agent

Rick found keeping his fellow contestants in the dark was a way to stay ahead. “I told many, many lies on that bus,” he laughs now. “In bed at night I would try to keep them all straight, what I said and to whom.”

Early on, Rick found himself isolated, ostracized by his fellow contestants. “For three shows straight, nobody would even sit with me. It was really awful.”

He was looking at certain failure with no allies, when two new contestants were brought onto the show. Both were already reality TV stars.

“They were young and beautiful and successful and so, of course, everyone forgot about me and started hating them, instead. I saw my opening. I became a kind of double agent, and formed a secret alliance with them, while pretending that I hated them too.”

Being a double agent has bled over into real life. While the show wrapped ten months ago, Rick was not allowed to tell anyone outside of his immediate family a thing about it. Never mind that he had won a suitcase full of cash. US$250,000, to be exact.

He did not even tell his parents.

“I wanted to share the surprise with them,” he says with warmth. “I wanted to be right there with them when they found out.”

This is one double agent who can be sincere when it matters.  

Destination X can be streamed in Canada on Amazon Prime.