Outside The Box

What did you do during that long holiday weekend?”

“We stayed home,” the young woman said with a laugh.

“It’s not just us then,” I replied, and she said, “No, a lot of our friends do the same now. It’s not worth the traffic and the trouble to go out. If we do need groceries or something, we try to go very early or very late.”

“Tracey and I needed some groceries on the Friday after the Fourth. The shelves were picked over, and the employees were working as fast as they could to restock them. They looked exhausted, and a couple of them told us things like, ‘I’m so over this,’ and ‘These people are so rude.'”

“We got an unusual call from Emergency Services that evening. They were asking people to conserve water because they were having trouble meeting the demand.”

We were discussing a conundrum faced by many who live in an area which, by accident or design, has become a tourist destination. You can see it all written on the faces sitting in traffic. There are the retirees, a little bewildered and thinking this is too much like what they moved here to escape. Then there are the carpenters, electricians and service employees who have thirty minutes for lunch and they’re beginning to think they’re either going to go hungry or be late getting back to work. Behold now the tourists, on your bumper, in a hurry to have that rest and relaxation they drove 3 hours to find.

An extreme example of frustration with tourism can can be found among the residents of Barcelona, Spain, who have gathered by the thousand to protest against mass tourism. They have taken to squirting visitors with water in popular dining areas and chanting “tourists go home.” The mayor of Barcelona has even pledged to eliminate short-term rentals in the city within five years.

Of course, there is a huge difference between a city like Barcelona and the small but rapidly growing towns in the tourist/part-time resident belt of North Georgia. Barcelona’s economy is built on information and communication technology, research and retail business. It can still prosper without mass tourism. Can the same be said for our mountain counties?

I suppose it depends on what we mean by “prosper.” Quality of life issues for someone who retired here to enjoy peace and tranquility are different than those whose quality of life derives from casting a net into the river of traffic to catch sales, rental income, or tax revenue. Unfortunately for the long term, the peace and tranquility which attracts retirees erodes rapidly in a flood of “tourons,” (which, if you didn’t already know, is a merger of tourist and moron).

Tourism is the low hanging fruit which is almost as hard for a small town to resist as the forbidden fruit was for Eve and Adam. It didn’t have to be this way. There have been and still are efforts on the part of a few wiser heads to attract the information and communications technology to this area which can sustain a growing economy at a lesser cost to peace and tranquility.

In the meantime, we improvise and adapt. If you are a business owner with employees, I urge you to give them time off during the week to do the shopping and run the errands that have become so much more onerous on the weekends. As for the rest of us, I once saw a bumper sticker in a little town overwhelmed by tourists which, short of hosing them down as in Barcelona, can become our rallying cry. The sticker said, “I AM NOT ON VACATION.”