If anyone see any sus dented vehicles or overhears anything, please call Bob at the Cemetery District Office or the Grand County Sheriff's Office.
So I've lived in a tourist town for a number of years now and over time I've realized how its not a particularly great life and at times it can be miserable. People have told me how great of a life it must be living here. But if you mention the negatives, they get taken aback.
A lot of houses in residential areas have been transformed into AirBnbs and this means every few days you have some new neighbors. A lot of these are people trying to cram 10+ into a house and their main objective is to get drunk and party for days on end. Want to go to sleep before 2am? Enjoy having a dozen drunk people standing on a balcony all night, screaming, swearing, blasting music and doing karaoke. Enjoy cleaning rubbish that visitors have thrown into your yard or being woken up by a group of drunken tourists screeching outside your home in the early hours.
Need to buy groceries? Have fun when you go to the store and shelves are empty from groups of tourists buying things up. Want to get a coffee? There will be a 30 minute wait. Need to get fuel for your car? You'll have to line up for 20 minutes while tourists are filling up their boats, jetskis. And your regular 10 minute drive to work is now 30 minutes due to the amount of tourists on the roads or someone crashing their camper van on the highway.
A lot of tourists came to town with main character syndrome. They don't think the people around them matter or they're visiting someone else's home. They're pushy, rude and think because they rented a budget motel room, they can act like they want. It's very common to see them leaving garbage around beaches, leaving shitty diapers behind or trashing places with zero respect. I speak to people in retail or hospitality who tell me stories of tourists coming into their stores and being rude, snobby or demanding some kind of deal.
There are a section of tourists who are stupidly cheap and stingy. There are parking lots near the beach that are full of people who travel in vans who will just live in a parking lot for days on end. They'll take over BBQs in parks, use the showers in the beach toilets and even open up power boxes in parks to charge their phones. They're too cheap to get a motel or even spend a few bucks to use a caravan park. At night the parking area and parks near the beach are full of these people either living out of a van and setting up tents. It makes a nice shanty town from people who won't spend a dime in town and all you get is dumped rubbish and every parking spot taken up. We even had one of these people park outside our home and stay the night and left some nice trash out the front when they left.
One thing I noticed was that when anyone online talked about the negative effect of tourism on the area, they would get dog piled by people for saying anything against it. There are a section of people (real estate, property investors, retail) who want infinite tourism growth in what is a small town. Even questioning it will get you set upon online and accused of trying to kill the town. Other locals will complain to me about tourism, but they will do it in a hush-hush way where they know no one else can hear it.
People trying to talk about things like infrastructure, education, public transport, crime is overlooked. People just talk about what activities will be supplied over the Summer. People will want to spend huge amounts of money on fireworks displays but don't care about spending money on public infrastructure. There seems to be no plan for this place besides unlimited tourism and selling off every bit of land.
There's a slow erosion on local neighborhoods. A lot of houses get bought up buy investors or people from out of town and turned into AirBnb. Suddenly your neighbors are gone and then you just have a revolving door of partygoers coming in. Post covid, more and more houses in the street are empty AirBNB's and the local community becomes less and less. You hear stories of people who lived in the area their whole life who have been kicked out of their house because the owner wants to make it an AirBnB to rake in more money. Now you have multi generational families who have to leave town because there's no rentals and there's no way they buy a house here. So then the people you've know for years are replaced by a dozen drunks who are going to do karaoke at 2am and threaten to kick your ass if you ask them to keep the noise down.
So the old thing you use to hear around here was "The vacation period is only for three months, stop complaining. But this keeps growing and growing. We now have high school graduates coming down here to party in the Spring. This then leads into Summer where the tourism is at peak mode. But then it carries into Autumn and with school vacation, you then get another influx of people in town. There's now also a big push by real estates, AirBnB for getting people here during the Winter by offering them deals. That way the money machine is running all year round and the one respite period the locals got from tourism is now shrinking.
Anyway, just some thoughts I've had on this subject for a while. Thanks for reading.
26 y.o. MMA coach Dante Liberato ran supported 500 miles from Colorado Springs to Moab while microdosing psychedelics, to understand how it would impact human endurance.
Original article is paywalled. Seems like a puff piece to get funding for a documentary, as there is a prominent GoFundMe link if you're into that sort of thing.