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Travel Matters | The Local Tourist
Want to get a travel writer fired up? Tell her an entire region of a country is “the most boring place ever.”
This morning, a colleague saw that phrase, about the Midwest, posted on Facebook by someone in the tourism industry.
It’s bad enough that the sentiment was posted by someone who should know better. What made it worse is that it’s also National Travel and Tourism Week, and the motto this year is Travel Matters.
Yes, it does, and the perception that a whole region is boring is one of the many reasons people should travel. After the exploration I’ve done in the past few years, visiting tiny towns and huge cities, I can tell you that no place is boring.
Every town has something unique. Every village has a story. The plains have volumes of tales and intrigue beneath their endless horizons. Mountain peaks are exposed history. Deserts teem with life and forests shelter mysteries.
Yesterday I attended a luncheon hosted by Chicago’s North Shore Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB). It was their annual event highlighting the impact tourism plays on their community. A whopping ten percent of jobs in Chicago’s North Shore…