It's strange being from Maine -- Vacationland, "The Way Life Should Be," "Worth a Visit, Worth a Lifetime" -- and having barely given a thought to tourism any summer of my life. It's obviously because I'm not from the coast and don't spend much time there, but places like Bar Harbor are on the same page as Martha's Vineyard in the summer; tons of tourists, tons of foreigners coming to make money, and general, abundant insanity.
It's funny that I acknowledge the tourism in oblique ways without remembering what's actually going on. "Cool, it's Friday, the restaurant should be pretty busy tonight" or, "Hey, it's pretty congested on my street. Walking down the sidewalk, past all these shops, is annoyingly unpleasant today." Not just because it's a weekend, but because it's one of the few days in the week in this pre-summer period when tons of people are unloading from the ferries and kickin' it with some island living for a few days.
I'm sure as the summer wears on into late June and further, weekends might take a backseat as tourists teem 24/7, but right now, it's an interesting shift from Friday to Sunday.
Tourism as a whole fascinates me. A waitress I work with is vacationing at Old Orchard Beach for the weekend, and while part of me is excited she's going to my state and to a beach I've been to tons of times, it's also unfathomable to me that she'd leave this island, surrounded by magnificent beaches, to go to Maine for something only mildly different. Ditto for people who go to Maine specifically to camp. I appreciate it and love Maine's outdoors, but isn't there allure for people to do this stuff in their own neck of the woods? My guess is it's the human, more specifically American, need to always be on the go, to be somewhere you're not, even if it's the same. I love traveling as much as anything, so I promise I'm not being cynical -- just trying to sort out the whole tourism thing. I'll be back with more of a diagnosis later this summer, when I've really stared the phenomenon in the face.
A sign on the island. You have to be blunt with tourists.
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I like that sign :-).
ReplyDeleteMy hiking trip was awesome - fantastic weather, nice views, lovely people - couldn't have been much better!
You wanted to know where I got the "currently reading" list from.
When you want to modify your blog, there's a tab called "layout" (at least that's what it's called in the German version) where you see the basic outline of your blog. There's a link called "add gadget": on clicking you get a list with gadgets you can add to the sidebar of your blog. The one I chose for my books is just called "list" (probably, in the English version) and I added it twice, named one "currently reading" and one "recently read". Easy :-). Now I just keep adding elements to these lists when I start/finish reading a book.
Hope that was more helpful than confusing...
Btw: I like this blog - what you say about tourists coming and going on weekends reminds me of my last summer job on the British Channel islands. It was the same there: weekend came and the isle got flooded with tourists! An interesting phenomenon.
Enjoy your weekend!!
Kristy