I have to say I was very impressed when I visited Cleveland a couple years ago, although I was endlessly confused by the rail system there (nothing like Metro, that’s for sure). IMO, there is nothing like Cleveland’s main library. I wanted to find the library manager and ask if I could maybe live there in exchange for doing some light maintenance or something. Incredibly beautiful & everything a library should be.
I grew up in lovely (cough cough) Trumansburg NY.
We always viewed our tourists with confusion, amusement and a bit of ridicule.
I mean, really! Why on earth were they visiting THAT pit of a town voluntarily?
Used to crack us up.
In retrospect I suppose the town has a bit of rustic charm, and of course the hiking, boating, swimming and camping in the area are fantastic, so it’s not all that weird that they were there. I’ve visited smaller and worse towns as an adult in a voluntary tourist capacity.
Now I live in Boston (work in the Back Bay) and for the most part I can avoid the tourists because they visit parts I don’t go to often (Faneuil Hall, etc) but even so they don’t annoy me much. I like living in a place that people want to visit. I even wave at the duck tours.
To school, actually, I was at ASU. And while I managed to find some non-conservative friends, we were vastly outnumbered. Still, there are much worse places, but I wasn’t unhappy to leave.
Glad to hear Broad Street is doing well. The last I heard (quite a while ago, to be fair) they were trying to ban people carrying alcohol on the street during First Friday. That seems manifestly stupid because the whole point is to wander from gallery to gallery…but I wasn’t surprised at the attempt.
And if anybody here wants to see New Orleans, I recommend NOT coming around Mardi Gras. There are so many parades that it’s hard to get around town. Now, if you want to party hard, that’s the time to do it, but otherwise I’d wait a few weeks. Right now the weather is great, for one thing. The summers are pretty brutal. It’s a fun place, though. It’s not as big as I thought it was, but it’s very distinctive.
When I was going to school in Boston (also kind of my hometown, though I lived far enough away that we never got any tourists) there were often busloads of tourists passing through the campus. Never had any problems with them, and it was kind of fun giving directions and taking the occasional family photo. I guess I was lucky that I never got trapped by a wandering mob when I was late for a test.
Now in Tokyo, it shouldn’t be that easy for the tourists to make much of an impression, but somehow they stand out like sore thumbs no matter what. Still, they’re all pretty pleasant folks for the most part. And when they aren’t it’s easy to slip away from them if you speak the language and they don’t.
People come to Dayton to visit the Air Force Museum, which is really something to see. I live very close to the museum, and even though there is plenty of tourism it doesn’t bother me that much.
However, there was a big Boy Scout thing, with boy scouts coming all over the area, just to camp in front of the museum a few months ago, I think in the fall. The traffic was incredible all weekend, and I’ve been spoilt so it irritated me. It really bothered my husband because he works on the base.
It was just a weekend so it wasn’t bad at all. The poor boy scouts, however, had to deal with rain the entire weekend, and a lot left to go home early. One of the fathers worked with my husband, and he said it was very miserable.
It was really funny to drive past the old runway, covered with limp tents and dejected scouts, to be in my warm home in front of the fire two minutes later. 
There’s one sort of tourist that I don’t like, the school kids who travel in packs. Especially when they’re being clueless or self-important, like the group I saw making traffic wait while they crossed against a light. Then there’s the lunchtime crowds but those can be easily avoided.
Now I amuse myself by thinking my own version of the old Bugs & Daffy routine:
“Rabbit Season!”
“Duck Season!”
“Rabbit Season!”
“Duck Season!”
“Rabbit Season!”
“Duck Season!”
“Tourist Season?!”
“Be vewy vewy quiet, we’re hunting touwists.”
My home-hometown is a rather quaint English market town - attracting day-trippers from London, and a fair few sailing boats from the continent. Everybody seems to have a pleasant enough time, and they’re never a problem. And never enough of them to be really noticeable.
In my first three years in Manchester, I didn’t knowingly come across somebody who wasn’t either visiting for another reason, or travelling on to elsewhere. Pity the poor fools who bothered with the trip to Liverpool, only to find out it’s a dismal grey drab semi-derelict dump with little to be proud of other than a famous band coming from there. The ones who head into the country are choosing the better option. It’s a shame, there’s far more history in Manchester - it’s was the bloody home of the industrial revolution, and a cradle of socialism, to start with!
And then we hosted the Commonwealth Games, and overnight the place was FULL of tourists. And the sun shone, for a few days. And everything had been cleaned/built/rebuilt. And it was wonderful - we even had Aussies admitting they’d had more fun than at the Sydney Olympics
I’m roudabouts Daytona Beach and get to deal with:
Bike Week
Race Week
Spring Break
Biketoberfest
Black College Reunion
pure HELL - traffic, crime, noise , crowds, litter. bleh. Altho I still work in DB, (right near the Speedway 
) I did move to the outskirts a few years ago. Not quite as bad, but we are still trapped in our homes during the “special events”.
Send more tourists!
The last ones were delicious!
If I lived in the stinky cesspit that is Galveston, or amongst the petrochemical wasteland of Beaumont, or the sheer horror of Vidor and similar places, I’d go stampeding to Houston at every opportunity.
FWIW, Houston has great ethnic restaurants, and I like the Museum District.
I’ve always wondered, though, why people go to San Antonio…
Most tourists to Nashville are the salt of the earth! Very relaxed and friendly. They are so appreciative of anything you do for them.
Yo! Grant! My folks live in Paris, TN. They do a lot of camping out and boating up at the lake. I don’t know why anyone would want to trash such a jewel.
This could be my life (substitute Chicago for NY, tall for short). I also suspect not wearing sunglasses is a factor, since people can actually make eye contact. In summer and at Christmas I often carry photocopied downtown maps and spare bus schedules. I’ve been helped out enough in my own travels to not mind doing it for others.
One situation never fails to amaze me: I’m in line at, say, Starbucks, behind middle-class, Caucasian, native English speakers who are obviously unfamiliar with any sort of coffee that doesn’t come in a can (with flavored Coffeemate for the ladies). A bit funny and a bit sad: you live somewhere without coffee shops or espresso bars, you vacation in Chicago with its vast selection of cafes and restaurants, and you pick the most ubiquitous coffee franchise ever for an exotic caffeine fix? Mercy.
I’m from Florida (St. Petersburg, if anybody knows where that is. It’s right next to Tampa, but so much cooler) and we get snowbirds too. I hate them. Hate them hate them hate them. And let me apologize to the Canadians, but any person I have even seen with a Canadian license plate CANNOT drive. Ontario, usually, although I do see a lot from Quebec and they’re no better. It might be because they’re old and not because they’re Canadian, but either way when I see one of them I try to get away as soon as possible. They drive like 15 miles under the speed limit and can’t seem to make their mind up about the lane they’re in. I understand that they’re in an unfamiliar place but we have this fancy thing here called public transportation. gasp
Sorry. But I do really hate the snowbirds. The other tourists, I just laugh at. They wear beach clothes everywhere (I know it’s 90 degrees, but a bathing suit in a restaurant?) and they’re always beet red. You come down from Minnesota with a body that hasn’t seen the sun in 3 months and think if you spend a day on the beach you’ll get tan?
I don’t know about the tourism in other places, but Florida’s entire economy depends on tourism, so I see them all the time. I just don’t really like them. It’s made me try very hard when I’m on vacation to blend in with the locals. No camera around the neck, no fanny pack, no guidebooks, nothing like that. No sneakers in Europe. No asking for directions unless I am hopelessly lost. It’s useful, since I don’t stand out so much I don’t present a target to pickpockets and panhandlers and the like.
Oh and elfkin477 I’m surprised that Floridians drive slow up there. Were they old?
Maybe they’re all Rongovians.
I hear they have a good water park. Must be good for my sister’s family to make a semiannual pilgrimage from Beaumont. 
That would explain why they were always going in and out of the embassy.
But that might actually mean they were NOT there voluntarily. I mean, how often do travellers visit their embassy voluntarily? It’s usually because they lost their passport, or need legal advice or somesuch.
Poor, suffering bastards.
Tourism is a major, if not the major industry, where I live. Individually, most of the tourists I meet–and I meet a lot of them–are fine. Nice folks just looking to have a good time on their vacation. (The only thing that really bothers me is when they point out my accent or chuckle if I say “y’all” or “ma’am.” Fuck you, buddy! Do I make fun of the way you talk?)
My problem is with the way the local government bends over backwards to accomodate tourists. It seems as though the needs of residents come second to the desires of visitors. Yes, tourists are good for economy, but people here need jobs that pay real money, not the no-benefit/crummy wage jobs in the tourist industry.
I work in the Service Industry, so, I LOVE tourists. They all have $$ and they all need help and are willing to give me more $$ if I can help.
The problem is, I’m not in a town that offers much for tourists. So, I only see them once in awhile–maybe why I like them so much.
I worked for a short time in Flagstaff AZ, where if you don’t have tourists you don’t have much. At that time I loved them for the $ (and the general economy–if everyone is making more that means I’m making more).
All of that being said, I was raised in a town where tourism is nothing more than a pain in the neck. The town was small enough that it couldn’t handle all of the extra traffic, not enough hotel rooms etc. I know it was great for our local economy, but I still didn’t like it so much (keep in mind, this is when I lived with Mom and Dad and didn’t have to worry about paying the rent).
I once saw a bumper sticker that said “If they call it tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?”
There is nothing more satisfying than saying those four little words: “you can’t miss it” when giving directions to a particular bad tourist, when you’re giving them the long way around to get them somewhere. I only do this to jerks, and I DO give them the correct directions, I just make it more complicated than it needs to be. I’ll go so far as to draw maps for the nice people.
Just my 2 cents on this, kind of ambiguous (SP?), isn’t it?
OK. That has got to be because they are old. Quebecer’s especially are known for their crazy driving. The only time I have ever driven through Quebec and seen people driving less than 40 kph over the limit was during the big Ice Storm. Even then, they just slowed down to the limit.
As for the OP, the only “tourists” I remember seeing in Moncton are others from the Maritimes. We have the biggest mall in Atlantic Canada so during shopping season it gets a little crowded. Normally I try to avoid the mall so they have little effect on my life.
Pretty much all the tourists who come to Memphis are here for one reason: Cybill Shepard’s childhood home!
No no, ha ha, they’re Elvis nuts, of course. You’ll see some of them visiting Sun Studio (a far more wonderful and enlightening experience than a trip to Graceland), but that’s about it, which is a shame because there’s a lot of terrific stuff in this city that didn’t happen 50 years ago; the Convention and Visitors Bureau just doesn’t seem to have realized it yet.
The tourists I’ve met have been without exception polite and genuinely curious about the city.