In two days May begins, which means two things.
One, we’ll be getting a snowstorm soon. Two?
It’s the unofficial start of tourist season.
It’s around this time tourists start to poke their heads above the Mackinac Bridge, like a gopher searching for Bill Murray. Soon they’ll be everywhere, causing 2 hour waits in restaurants and wondering just what that big thing is sticking into the water in downtown Marquette (spoiler alert: it’s the Ore Dock).
For many places in the UP tourism is a mainstay of the economy. From St. Ignace to Munising to Eagle Harbor shops, restaurants, and hotels will make the money that carries them through the rest of the year in the next few months.
Tourism would be great if it wasn’t for, you know, the tourists. And I’m not saying all tourists are bad.
A lot of them share the same wonder that we do for this magical place, and just enjoy it. But then there are the… other tourists.
The ones who come up in the middle of July and bring winter jackets and gloves because they think it snows up here 12 months a year. I see them downtown all the time, and feel like chasing after them yelling “it only snows ten months of the year up here”
Or the tourists who drive up to the UP in a motorhome that’s towing a pickup that itself is towing two jet skis, and then complain because they have to fill up their tank every 12 miles with gas that “costs a lot more up here than it does back home”.
(I know, don’t get started on that subject again.)
Or the tourists who think the UP is so uncivilized that their cell phones won’t work, they’ll have to hunt their own food, and will have to use an outhouse at least twice during their vacation.
Thankfully, those tourists are rare. Most are fantastic visitors, who realize that this is their playground but it’s our home. We’re sharing it with them, and they appreciate that. So over the next few months, get ready to welcome them.
The ones who think they’ll need to hunt their own food? Maybe not so much.
I’m Jim Koski, and that’s another slice of “Life in the 906.”
