Tourist vs Resident

Although this is not necessarily a blog about my letterboxing experiences, it is inspired by a message thread on Atlas Quest.  Emcsquared recently posed the questions:
What do tourists do that gets under your skin?
If a tourist wants to blend in, what should they do? What should they stop doing immediately?

What followed turned into a discussion of various peeves of local people.

We live about 45 minutes away from center city Philadelphia, a city that I love dearly, and one of my Bucket List wishes is to walk every street in that wonderful city.  I had a map that I was logging all of my walks but it went the way of everything else that was on my hard drive when my computer crashed last summer so I guess I will just have to start walking all over again.  As a walker, I see everything there is to see on each street.  I do look up a lot, I do walk slowly and I always, always, always carry a camera (these are some of Miss Moon’s tongue in cheek pet peeves).  I want to see EVERYTHING there is to see.  However, I don’t tie a sweater around my shoulders (a MysticzGal irritation) because it is tucked into the waistband of my precious Columbia fanny pack (a Wry Me no-no).  Anyway, the point is that I take my time, I stop into local restaurants because I am in the area and want to experience everything. I buy local items and help to support the local businesses.  I have the time to tour leisurely and since I drive myself there, I can come and go when I please.

The story changes when I make my once a year visit to New York City, a town I would never have the courage to intentionally drive in alone.  At this point, I will have to mention that I did get lost once on my way from Pennsylvania to the Pirate in Every Port event held in Groton, CT.  My GPS somehow took me right down Broadway on a rainy Friday night.  Fortunately, I was not in a hurry and didn’t panic and eventually got to Groton safely, swearing never to drive in NYC again.  My once a year trip is on a tour bus which my employer offers to us each spring.  Another Miss Moon peeve is “it's kind of annoying that unless they are visiting someone who lives here they NEVER leave Manhattan.”  Well, we are dropped off around Time Square and have eight hours to do whatever we want.  I would love to visit something outside of this area but since we have taken this trip for the past eight years and our time is so short, we have visited almost every tourist area there is to see.  We have taken the open deck tour buses and travelled once to Brooklyn but to be honest, it was a residential area and although lovely, there wasn’t a whole lot of reason to get off the bus to look around.  We only had eight hours.  I suspect after seeing the numbers of tour buses dropping people off constantly during the time we are there, it is the same for a lot of people.  One year we did plan our day around NYC letterboxes and did visit a couple of wonderful areas, thanks to Miss Moon, but then Bill grew bored and impatient with letterboxing and we didn’t do that again.

In my experience, letterboxes are a terrific way to get to see places that are a little non touristy.  A few years ago, we visited Virginia Beach and were guided around the town by the boxes that I had planned.  Last September, I visited VB again and letterboxes by Casa del Sol and BB Stacker were my main tour guides.  Bill and I made a cross country drive to South Dakota a few years ago and picked up a couple of boxes in each state that we visited.  In doing this, we got to see the gravesite of William McKinley in Ohio and the Beulah Schoolhouse in Wyoming, we enjoyed some delicious ice cream in Indiana as well as experiencing a whole lot of unexciting rest areas in various states.

Now back to some of the other peeves on the message thread.  According to one responder, she doesn’t like it when people “come to our state and shop at outlet malls which sell the same crap they could have bought without leaving home.”  I do that.  I spent 37 years working in retail.  I hate to shop.  My theory is that if I can’t buy it at the grocery store, Walmart, Home Depot or Boscovs, our local department store, all stores within a mile and a half of our home, then I don’t need it.  When my work day is done, I come home and enjoy my family, I don’t want to shop.  But when I am on vacation and most of my family and all of my housework is back in Pennsylvania, I have the time to shop and to buy some of the same things that I could buy in PA if I wanted to waste my family time shopping.  I figure I am supporting the local economy here.  After all, who works in these shops?  My guess is that they are mostly local people so I will indulge in a little shopping when I am being a tourist.

Another of the same responder’s complaints is “come to our state and want to buy bargain homes”.  We did that.  We bought a condo from an elderly gentleman who was moving into his son’s home.  We did get a good deal on it and now we come here and support the economy in Florida as well as in Pennsylvania.  There are four condos in our particular building.  The other three are sitting empty because houses are so plentiful in Florida so I figure we actually did someone a favor by buying their house.

I don’t have a rebuttal for everything that was mentioned on this board.  In fact, I tend to agree with Wry Me’s comment that people should wait till they leave to wear the visors and souvenir T-shirts they purchased while visiting.  However, I have to admit to wearing my Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap the same day I bought it last spring when we attended the preseason game in Clearwater.    And I have to agree 100% with Amanda’s wish that tourists need to read signs.  I find them invaluable, however, in defense of some tourist areas, it takes a while to get used to how the signage works.  For instance, in some towns, the street signs indicate the cross street and in other towns, the street signs tell you what street you are currently on.  Also, if a bus sign tells me the A line runs through this section, I  may have no idea what the A line is.  So some homework needs to accompany the sign reading at times.

And this brings us to the next part of my discussion. Four years ago, Bill bought a retirement home about an hour away from Disneyworld.  He is retired and has snowbirded here the past four winters. I still work so I come to Florida whenever the airfare is really cheap and I have a few days of vacation.  Most of the time I remain in Pennsylvania working and spending lots of time with my daughter and grandchildren and shoveling all the snow by myself while Bill lays by a pool.  

When I first started coming to Florida we did a lot of the local touristy things.  I had no desire to visit Disney World but we did go to Down Town Disney.  The walk through the town is free although the price of the merchandise is outrageous.  We visited the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse which is only about twenty minutes from our home and climbed to the top along with many other visitors.  We took the St. John Riverboat tours and oohed and aahed over the alligators we saw (I still ooh and aah over any alligator I see!) We drove on the beach of Daytona Beach, something that thrills me each time we do it.  We did normal touristy things in order to get to know the area.  Now that I have been coming to Florida for a few years, I have begun exploring all of the nooks and crannies, much like I do when I visit Philadelphia.  This is a very historic area consisting of many small towns and I drive up and down the streets and back roads every chance I get.  It is not an area with many restaurants and shops so we eat at home most of the time or we go to a chain restaurant because that is what is here and that is where the local people work and eat.  However, I still do touristy things like stop in the local post office which is an aged white house and ask the post mistress just why the sign says “Welcome to Historic Enterprise” and she explained to me the history of her little town.  I have started to walk in all of the parks even though I am VERY nervous dong this.  I have had to learn about alligators and snakes and alligators and red ants and alligators and spiders and every rustle of the palm trees' branches convinces me that one of these is headed my way.  I have learned that squirrels running through the palm trees sound a whole lot the way I imagine an alligator would sound doing the same thing.  I tried to use letterboxes to guide me around the area but I have been very disappointed to discover that boxes here are not maintained and most are missing so I have given up on even searching for them anymore.

I am currently in Florida and yesterday I learned a very valuable lesson.  Hunting laws in Florida are not like hunting laws in Pennsylvania.  In Pennsylvania, there is no hunting on Sunday so when yesterday turned out to be an absolutely stunning day and Bill was intent on watching the Pittsburgh Steelers lose again, I set off for a local 9000 acre wildlife management area that I had seen on the map.  My hopes were that I would find some fascinating spots to place some new letterboxes that I had brought along with me.  I started off through a pine forest on a mile and a half trail and before I was even a tenth of a mile into the trail, it turned into the normal tropical jungle that scares me to death.  However, I decided to plod on and overcome my fear and the trail alternated from deciduous forests and back to jungle themes for the next mile.  I soon heard voices and I approached two men in their late twenties and a boy about eight years old all wearing blaze orange and carrying rifles.  They were very nice guys and told me that I needed to wear my orange whenever I am in the woods in Florida because hunting here is seven days a week from October through March.  When I asked them what they were hunting, they told me that they were looking for wild hogs and small bears.  Oh good, two more things to add to my list of things to fear in Florida forests.  They told me to stay with them because they were leaving and I would be safer with them since they had orange on and were parked near me.  We enjoyed a nice chat on the way back to our cars and they told me a lot about how to hike in this area.  I had thoroughly read the entire website which was devoted to this area and didn’t learn half of the things that these hunters taught me.  Sometimes you do just have to talk to the locals to find out the things you need to know.

One thing that I know for sure is that whether I am in Pennsylvania or Florida, the absolute best things are free and totally local.  There is an eagles' nest in our condo complex and I have watched the eagle mother and father raise two young families and this visit, I am watching them prepare the nest for the new brood which will be born before I get here in the spring.  And the views that we get from the lake which is about one hundred feet south of our home are unparalleled by any tourist attraction.   Funny how the things that are part of nature are the best things about being a tourist or a resident!