If you live in a community that is tourism based, you'll understand this post.
In the summer, they invade our peaceful community like locusts. They cause traffic jams. They allow their kids to roam free terrorizing local merchants. They don't clean after their pets. They cause noise pollution and car accidents by yapping on their cell phones. They are...tourists. You've seen the bumper stickers: "If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?" For the traffic jam causing, cell phone yapping, bratty kid, dog poop leaving ones mentioned above, I agree. Then at the same time we can't allow those bad apples to ruin the bunch. Not all tourists are bad. PD and I were once tourists before we fell in love with The Oregon Coast and moved here. We still play tourist every once in a while. Plus not all tourists are bad.
The reason I titled the post "Be Kind To Tourists" is that there are people in the community that bad mouth them. My friends that recently visited last month mentioned they overheard a cashier at a local grocery store bad mouthing tourists to another customer. The cashier forgot to mention the big reason our community survives...tourist dollars. These people spend money in our stores, restaurants, and hotels/motels. We need them. I would be out of a job without them and PD wouldn't have her new job (pending physical and psyche evaluation)as a 911 dispatcher if it weren't for tourists causing accidents.
'nuff said.