I am getting pretty fed up with vacations to glamorous places…hawaii or the carribean leaves me cold. I also don’t like crowds and pushy vendors…so the idea just occurred to me…why not go to a BORING place for vacation?
Here’s my criteria, I want a place that is:
-fairley remote from a large city
-cheap to stay in
-devoid of great scenery or “natural wonders” (they attract those pesky crowds!
-inhabited by nice, slightly confused locals, who are not interested in you
-have a slow pace to life…nothing to do, so why hurry the day along?
With these in mind, where would you suggest that I go? I really like boring places; I would throw out (for your consideration):
-Wyoming, RI : this is a place where time has stopped (around 1930)! There is absolutely NOTHING to do here! It is so deliciously banal!
-Worcester, MA: another place caught in a time warp (around 1955)-you can do nothing at all here!
-Saxonville, MA: nice place, nobody seems to know it exists!
Please post your proposals for boring vacation spots!
Manhattan, KS. The Little Big Apple. You can take a day trip out to Mt. Sunflower, the highest part of the state. I always feel like I’m back in the 80s when I’m there. At the very least you’ll leave 10 pounds heavier.
Here’s a quote of me to my sister at a mall there. “Wow, I’ve never seen so many White people in my life!”
Well, I was going to suggest my delightfully dull hometown of Petaluma, California, but it’s in the San Francisco Bay Area, so that’s probably too crowded.
So, how about Mitchell, South Dakota? Home of the Corn Palace! Oooh, they have a Corn Palace webcam, but it seems to be down or something at the moment. Tragic.
Weyburn, Saskatchewan. It’s a prairie town of about 10,000, 70 miles from Regina, which isn’t all that exciting itself. Weyburn’s biggest tourist attraction is the local museum’s collection of silver willed to them by an eccentric local farmer.
And then there’s Harmony, California, population 10. Right on the ocean and just off Highway 1 north of Morro Bay, the local watering hole has only four stools at the bar.
Boring place, but fun to say that you’ve been there.
Now do you want a boring town? Try Statenville GA. It’s a one stoplight town and nothing has happened in it since my grandparents got married there in 1930. (Okay, okay, residents of Georgia please don’t flame me, I’m kidding. I suppose it’s remotely possible that at some point in time something else might have happened there.)
Doggone it! That was one of my first thoughts, and you preempted it. I can trump that, though; Nashua, NH. I defy anyone to find anything to do in Nashua, other than shop. Worcester actually has at least one museum and the Centrum.
Racer72 said Walla Walla, WA. Actually, go 60-80 miles west and you get to the land of “There’s No There There”. I love it! Hundreds of square miles of huge, rolling hills covered in grass and nothing else as far as the eye can see. I have dreams about that area! I love it!
For entertainment, head to the Goldendale area where you can find a full-size replica of Stonehenge and the Maryhill Museum where you can learn more than you’d ever care to about Queen Marie of Romania. If the evening is clear, you can go to the observatory outside of Goldendale and look at stars and galaxies. It was a little cloudy and the moon was full when we went so we missed that. That is about all there is way out there.
The Columbia River cuts through this wonderful land, giving some break to the nothingness. If you want to, you can go to the dams that hold it back and get freaked out by the loud buzzing of the huge overhead electrical wires.
Of places like the ones listed above, I reverse a popular expression to say “it’s a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there.” BTW, I have been to Weyburn, Sask., and have even camped out there in the municipal campground. It is a fine example of staid, midwestern, agrarian “nice town” (although more windy than I’d like, and I’ll bet it’s hell in the wintertime).
Another boring place is the town where I spent last weekend, Lewisburg, Tennessee. It does have the Tennessee Walking Horse Museum (don’t all horses walk?), and the city is particularly known for the manufacture of pencils. It seems a world away from Music City, USA (Nashville), but is in reality only about 45 minutes by way of I-65. The city has also had a Wal-Mart since the late 1970’s, back when that retail chain was confined to a few southern states.
Ok, since it’s saturday night and I’m bored, I’ll waste my first post here on this suggestion (ps, you can blame the horror blimp monster for my presence here… I’ve been lurking for a few days):
Trinidad, CO
It’s quaint, it’s small, and it’s terribly boring (at least that’s my humble take from the two hours I spent there). In fact, my friends and I could only find one restaurant (which was one of only several businesses that we saw that weren’t closed, abandoned, and boarded up, besides a multitude of liquor stores and one or two fast food chains that seemed to be doing well for themselves). This restaurant - the only one in town as far as we could tell - served both “italian” and “mexican” food (the end of Goodfellas came to mind). Everyone inside wore cowboy hats and looked at us strange when we walked in the door. The building was also pink with a big neon sign. It was weird. There was once a “Bob & Earl’s 24 Hour Diner” there too, which was our intended destination, but it was closed and boarded up like the rest of the town…
Tikki, I was going to suggest Washtucna, a little wide spot in the road in the middle of nowhere. I spent a month there when I was 14, other than hanging out at a local restaurant or going to the Snake River, there is nothing to do there. The only tavern in town shut down a few years ago. One of my cousins actually graduated from Washtucna High School, there were 6 people in his graduating class. But Washtucna would be too boring for anybody.
