How To Not Be An Entitled, Snobbish Vacationer: The Boiling Pot of Tourist Towns Part 2

Some tips on interacting with slack jawed yokels like yours truly

This is part two of a two part series on tourism in small towns. The controversial first part from last week can be found here

So all of us full-time residents of small town tourist destination have, gradually, over the course of decades, grown to feel a deep and abiding resentment for the tourists that frequent our regions, particularly in the summer. They are overrunning our natural areas, pushing us out of our favorite public places, and now they are pricing us out of our homes. If we are to fight off this scourge and maintain our hold on the future of our own communities we have a lot of work to do. Some things will have to change significantly.

But all of us have tourists (fudgies) that we love. And we like when they come visit. Our family and friends from down state and out of state have some right to enjoy the natural beauty and small town charms of places like Northern Michigan as well. Nature is for all of us. And we locals don’t mind sharing it, at least a little. It makes it easier to do so though, when you tourists don’t make it so hard. When you act like decent people and not entitled jerks, when you reject fudgie mentality.

So here are a few tips on how to behave as a tourist in a small town vacation destination. Some dos and don’ts in no particular order.

View of Lake Michigan from Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

How to be a Better Tourist and Win the Hearts of the Native Populace

1. Don’t Come. I’m serious. You don’t have to take your vacation in an overcrowded vacation destination at the busiest time of year (like Northwest Michigan in July). There are other options, including the choice to travel to a less busy locale that is equally beautiful, where local residents would be grateful for your economic stimulus rather than resentful of your bumbling presence. Here’s a few options, for example:

   1. Lake County, MI: The poorest county in the state and also a paradise of rivers and inland lakes. Perfect for hunters and anglers, but also hikers and campers. The restaurants will have a table and be glad to see you. Jones Ice Cream is the best in the state. Fascinating history is on display at the Idlewild Historic Center.

   2. Sault Ste. Marie, MI: In the UP, but actually a shorter drive than Traverse City for many of you, my erstwhile home could use your tourist bucks. Sandy, clear Lake Superior beaches within 10 minutes of town, great trails, the Soo Locks. A very unique and beautiful place, with a fascinating history. Get a burger at West Pier Drive In

   3. Tawas City/Oscoda: The sunrise side of Michigan is, for some reason, neglected. But you still have a Great Lake with sandy beaches, and no crowds. The Au Sable River is great for kayaking and canoeing and the trails along its bluffs can’t be beat views-wise. Pretty good Mexican place in Tawas too if I recall.

   But, you say, “I am visiting family in Northwest Michigan, or some other such overcrowded tourist destination! Or I have some ancestral nostalgic attachment to it. Fair enough, my heart is not completely calcified. So come, if you must, but here’s my advice.

2. Treat service employees with decency: They are human beings, many of them driving from great distances to work in these towns (they’ve been priced out by your Airbnb). Most restaurants and stores are understaffed for this reason. Expect a wait. Be patient. Be gracious. And for God’s sake, tip well! If you can afford to travel up here this time of year you can afford to tip well.

3. Drive the right speed: Why do all you people drive way too slow on the highways and way too fast through residential neighborhoods? Just drive the speed limit, I beg of you. Some of us have to go to work, or to pick up the kids.

4. Quiet down: One of the great joys of being up here is to experience nature. So why are so many of you constantly drowning it out. Please leave the Bluetooth speakers at home when you go for a hike at Empire Bluff, or to the beach. Not everyone loves Jason Aldean or Taylor Swift like you do. You might hear a loon or something if you listen for ten seconds. And if you’re renting an Airbnb in a neighborhood please don’t get drunk and yell all through the night. Some of us actually live here. Some of us have to get up early for work. Some of us have young children.

5. Don’t use Airbnb or VRBO: I know this is inconvenient, easier said than done. But these apps are destroying our neighborhoods. It’s clearly unethical to use them if it can be avoided. If you knew all the people who were priced out of a home, sometimes literally left homeless, due to these apps that I do, you would at least hesitate. Look for other options, there are hotels and there are still many cool old school “resorts” with like 10 little cabins for rent on a lake, relics of the bygone era when blue collar families vacationed in them every summer. Places that would not be housing families if you weren’t there, unlike an STR found on an app. If you must go the STR app route try to not do it in a neighborhood. If you must do it in a neighborhood, be quiet.

   

   A small, traditional “vacation motel” in Manistee, MI

6. Don’t complain about the stuff you can’t buy here: “I can’t even get a decent eggplant parmesan around here!” This is a rural area. If you can’t handle that, see number 1.

7. Don’t stand, open mouthed and immobile, in a grocery aisle or on a sidewalk, completely oblivious, blocking everyone and everything from passing: Do you do this at home? Do you recognize you live in a society? Did someone bonk you on the head??

8. DO Adopt an attitude of curiosity about our region: Be interested in the places you visit! It seems like common sense but then again you see how many people just seem to come here to party or eat ice cream and start to wonder whether people actually even have curiosity to begin with. But we’d love to talk to you about our towns, beaches, history etc. If you want to know. No one’s expecting you to write a paper or take notes but a modicum of genuine interest will take you a long way. If you don’t care about this place, if you only want to eat ice cream and buy t-shirts, why are you here? They don’t have ice cream places in Joliet?

9. Don’t “Fudgiesplain”: This one drives my wife particularly nuts. When someone who isn’t from here and doesn’t live here year round tries to explain what the area is really like. This can come in many forms. It can be as infuriating as rich fudgies telling me there isn’t really a lot of poverty around here (drive down a dirt road!) to something as seemingly inconsequential as a tourist recommending a good restaurant to me like it’s some big secret even though I’ve been there 100 times. The problem with this is not the intentions of the tourists, which are tame enough, but the fact that they are acting as if they have ownership of this place despite not investing the requisite time, energy, or money in putting down real roots or taking part in the life of the community. I don’t care if your family has had a cabin up here for 100 years. If you don’t live through winters up here don’t act like your stake in the community is anything close to mine or my family’s. Please. If the community changes in a way you don’t like, you simply don’t come up to your cabin for a while. For those of us who live here? We have to try to fix it.

10. DO participate in local community events, as a supporter, “ally”, donor: The day after the fourth I spent the morning working the Lions club pancake breakfast in my small town. They even let me make the actual pancakes this time, I must be moving up in the world. At these pancake breakfasts a huge majority of the population of our town shows up. I see neighbors, friends, lay people and clergy I work with, and people I know in passing from John and Sandy’s or the kids T-ball league. We raise a lot of money at these things, and the money goes to good stuff: we paid for a local poor, blind girl pay to go to a camp for the blind, we pay for local kids tools when they go into a trade, we fixed up the pavilion at the park in town. So it’s good that some fudgies come too. We’ll take their money, of course, but it also shows a little bit of that curiosity I talked about, at least a tiny bit of a sense that they give a shit about this community beyond its ability to serve them in their quest for recreation. So if you get a chance to go to a local event like this, go. Be friendly, donate a little money. Be curious.

11. Don’t be a blabbermouth: We have a really great fishing river here in my little county. A few years back some big “fishing influencer” made a Youtube video about it and now every year its crowded as hell during the salmon run. Apparently he got death threats from some locals and now is persona non grata around here. If you find some cool, relatively unspoiled or undiscovered place, please keep it to yourself. We locals have places that we know that are still relatively secret and we’d like to keep at least a few that way. So don’t post about it, and don’t tell anyone. Just enjoy the peace and quiet.

12. Don’t be selfish: When I was a young man a group of friends and I would frequent the closest beach on Lake Michigan. We would often walk down the beach a ways. To the north was a rich person’s house on the lake. They were (of course) never actually there but they employed a full time security guard to come down and chase us away from in front of their house. This despite it: a) being very clearly legal in Michigan law to cross the beach on the sand in front of someone’s house and b) the house being empty anyway. Don’t be like those people. Don’t be a paranoid selfish psycho.

    

    Crystal Lake outlet in Frankfort, MI

There are certainly others. Fellow locals can chime in with their own favorites in the comments or wherever. Some honorable mentions include: don’t litter, don’t complain about normal stuff like mosquitos, don’t treat me like I’m inconveniencing you when I’m going about normal life and it somehow gets in the way of your vacation. Don’t drop slurs in front of my kids. Don’t run over my mom with a pontoon boat.

But all of these can be reduced to an essence, an overarching theory on how to be a good tourist or at least not be a bad one, which is: treat the area you are vacationing in as an actual community, rather than just a playground that exists solely for your recreation. I beg you to recognize that people actually live here. We raise our kids and send them to school, we go to work, go to church, do our best to pay the bills and help out our neighbors when we can. We want the same things out of life as you. A comfortable place to live, the ability to pay our bills, good schools, a safe neighborhood, a decent night’s sleep. Once in a while a date night with the wife or a guys night out with friends. Simple stuff really, and common decency demands that you do what you can to make it a little easier on us, to not make it harder for us to live a quality life. After all, you are guests in our home.

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