Vacationing In Colorado.
By Dave Hamby
Having just been on a 10 day vacation in Colorado, I’m again reminded of a sad truth. Coloradoans don’t like tourists, Texans especially.
It’s funny how folks who so heavily depend on tourism can dislike tourists so much.
It’s kinda like the folks who live in a military town. Without the federal dollars coming from the military base, the town would most likely dry up and blow away. But ask one of the locals what they hate the most and they’ll answer, “Them dang G.I.s.” Perhaps there’s some hidden reason these locals would like to see the troops go away. Something like, “If them doggone soldiers weren’t here spending their paychecks we wouldn’t be able to afford to eat and Lucy wouldn’t be so cotton-picking fat.”
I’m thinking this must be the case for the citizens of Colorado.
With a lot of thought and a little empathy I can almost see their point. After all, here are millions of folks from all over the country, mostly Texas, coming to their beautiful state to enjoy the cool weather and gawk at their purple mountains’ majesty. In the course of doing so they clog up all of their roads with motorhomes plugging along at a speed a snail would be comfortable with. (Of course if you’ve ever taken a motorhome up one of these mountain passes you’d realize this is as fast as they can go.)
Still, even on the flat stretches these RV’ers poke along enjoying the scenery. “Golly Martha, would you take a look at that there majestic mountain?” “Yeah George, and it’s really purple too.” Meanwhile the locals are stacking up behind these slowpokes and they’re building up some real serious resentment. Heck, some of these folks are really in a hurry; they’re late opening up their tourist shops.
If that’s not enough to get their jaws tight, some of these tourist folks look at those mountains like they belong to them, just because they’re Americans. I guess it’s that song, America the Beautiful, that leads to this misconception. Those mountains they’re singing about are back east somewhere, these mountains belong to Colorado.
I saw some bumper stickers a while back that read, “If God wanted Texans to ski, he would have given them mountains and snow.” Of course some wise-guy Texans aggravated Colorado’s resentment by coming up with a bumper sticker that read, “If God hadn’t wanted Texans to ski, he wouldn’t have given them Colorado.”
Take the fact that you can hardly even find a hardware store in most of Colorado’s small towns because they’ve all been turned into souvenir shops and that property values have gone clear through the roof and you can begin to understand why folks in Colorado wear t-shirts that read, “If it’s tourist season, why can’t we hunt them?”
Last year with all the bad luck the folks in Colorado had, the drought and the forest fires and such, tourism was really down. I’m guessing that most Texans figured that if they wanted to vacation in Hell, they could save a little gas and go to West Texas or Southern New Mexico. Heck, folks in Fort Stockton are always glad to see you.
With so few people enjoying the cool, smoky weather, some Coloradoans seem to have found a new appreciation for tourists. It’s not like we were made to feel welcome or anything like that, there just seemed to be less resentment at our presence there. While we were staying in Gunnison, 1600 Hell’s Angles converged on that small town to hold their national convention. I’m thinking the local Chamber of Commerce was relieved to know there would be a little revenue for them this year.
In our travels we stopped at Canyon and went to admire the Royal Gorge. We were surprised to find they had fenced access to the bridge off and were charging $17 admittance to walk across. I felt like they should at least change the name to “Royal Gouge.”
At least here’s some Coloradoans true to their feelings and taking some active steps to get rid of all those pesky tourists. I think this will really do the job too.
This article originally appeared in the Round Rock Leader