The Thursday Ramble: Tourist Season

 There was a really tasteless joke in Miami 30 years ago that went something like this, "They say it is tourist season, yet they get so upset when one gets shot, not at all like deer season in New Jersey." 

I lived in Florida for almost 20 years, tourist season was a very real part of life. With Disney and the world of Worlds, there were actually several tourist seasons, Thanksgiving through New Years, snowbirds from November through March, spring breakers for a month around easter, and Brits broiling in the sun in summer (only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the Florida heat and humidity in July and August.) 

Washington DC has a couple of defininate tourist seasons.  Summer, starting in late May, though the end of August is family season. This crowd is filled with disheveled parents, bored children, most with sore feet in shoes that were stylish and not made for walking. You look at the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol building and think that is a nice 15 minute walk, not knowing it is over two-miles of hellscape. They think they can "see the Smithsonian" on Thursday before lunch, not realizing that the Smithsonian is eight museums in well over one-million square feet of space, and that does not include the National Gallery of Art - with two additional buildings or the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center out at Dulles with nearly 300,000 sq ft of aircraft and spacecraft displays. 

School group seasons, there are two - mid-October through mid-November, and March-April when masses of middle and high school groups from across the eastern half of the country descend on the city. These are marked by large numbers of clearly distracted students, trying to be cool and fit in, led by either overly concerned chaperons or chaperones who are clearly glad they got a free trip to DC and don't really care if the kid wander off never to be seen before the bus leaves to go back to Iowa. They travel in packs of about 35, the number of seats on a tour bus, and all try to squeeze into the same door of a subway car, out of fear that if they go in a different door, they won't go to the same place. 

Then there is Cherry Blossom season, also known as the season of disappointment. The Cherry Blossom festival is scheduled, the dates published, tours are booked, hotel prices are doubled about a year in advance, and the trees pay absolutely no attention to the schedule. Half the time the trees bloom two weeks before the festival and the trees are nice and green when the tourists arrive, about half the time, the trees bloom two weeks after the festival, leaving the tourists straining to see the pink buds and wondering what all of the hype is about. If the weather suddenly turns hot for three or four days, the trees may bloom, go into leaf and drop all of the blossoms - falling and drifting like snow, in three days. Maybe one in ten years, the peak bloom, matches the dates of the festival, the other nine out of ten years tourists wonder why they didn't book the Mardi Gras package instead, the parades always occur on the scheduled day (but seldom on time.)