Ok, you asked for it!! This is what I think--if you live somewhere, take a visitor around to see the sights, you are NOT a tourist. If you go to the same place every year on vacation you are NOT a tourist (don't ask my cousins about that, even though I went TO Balboa every year of my life for a very long time, they called me a tourist, the WORST possible insult!!). If you go to Hawaii, drive 700 miles on your rental car, see everything there is to see, you ARE a tourist. I did read a definition of a tourist and according to that, if you walk out the door, you are a tourist--what do they know????

My only questions are: when is tourist season over and what is the limit? Wonderful questions

I believe you can be a tourist in your own town!!! I really love being a tourist in my own back yard. Touring to me is exploring and looking at things differently, and taking in the sights. I've lived on Whidbey Island for many years and yet when I get on the ferry to go 'off island' as we say here, I feel like a tourist, and I love that feeling! When you act or feel like a 'local' you don't seem to see or experience things in the same way. I prefer to be a tourist, and will be one for the rest of my life... It's just how I see things, and how I feel... ;-) Great topic!!!!!

Hmmmmmm ??? I don.... oh ... well.. perhaps...or... rather...actually.. I dont know, but it was excellent questions and I see you have a splendid time. :-))) WHEEW ! That was hard :-)))

I'm with Akemi (nongo) above. There is something fresh in what she has said. As I read her explanation, being a tourist is a positive state of mind. Being a tourist is a GOOD thing to be savored. I don't think of myself as a tourist in my own hometown but there is a restored 1913 vintage carousel here with a hands on museum for kids of all ages...I always feel like a tourist when I take somebody there. I'm not sure why. I suppose we all like to feel like "insiders" somewhere and being a tourist has an "outsiders" connotation. When I was a boy of 10, 11, 12..., my family spent two weeks each summer on vacation in New England. We were joyously tourists staying in tourist cabins, hitting the beaches, taking lots of pictures, eating out all the time...savoring every moment of being away from home with no responsibilities to anyone in our normal sphere (school, work, our neighborhood)!!! Great thought provoking on your part Tara. I think you and Sig were tourists that day driving the North Cascades Highway:))) And that's a good thing.

If you came to stay with me. Tara, I should be COMPELLED to show you all the wonderful places around here, and quilt-making be damned! and a WEEK..4 might just scratch the surface! Here are some disjointed thoughts... I love exploring and don't mind being thought a tourist, since my brother started cab driving we have dicovered places in our own area we didn't know existed. When I'm out in the countryside I like going down lanes with flowers growing down the place where the white line would be, and tourists seem to stick to the main road, so....... And if we took the dogs with us it would disguise the fact, if it matters, that we were tourist and guide! Locally we call tourists 'grockles', and there is a rather coarse definition of them which is that they are like hemorrhoids: they go bright red and hang around in bunches! Not really fair on the majority, but still true! There are also 'Day-trippers'...two sorts, 1.Coach parties, blue-rinsed, beige clothed, 99% female,don't stay anywhere long. 2.Families in cars, don't leave London/Birmingham/wherever till after breakfast, arrive after hours of almost stationary 'travel' to find all the parking gone as it is now after noon. Bad tempered, ill and over heated kids. Why do they bother? I could write a treatise on the subject,and up the road at the Uni many of the courses are Tourism based (except now it's called 'Hospitality!!!!) What a can of worms!!!

Very well written sweetie, great read flows nicely!

I was born in England and anywhere I go in England I am not a tourist, I am an explorer, exploring my own country. When you went out with Sig you were not a tourist but a tour guide. I believe you can go on a tour and still not be a tourist. I don't think Sig was a tourist while he was with you, he was a visitor. Like Andrea says "What a can of worms!!" Excellent survey. Bravo!!!!!

I think you are a tourist outside your own home realm ..everything in life and nature is a new experience and always new things to see and enjoy awesome thought my dear

I don't think of the birds at my feeder as tourists but as visitors. We have bicycle tourists, who are just passing through for the exercise. I think of tourists as quickly looking and leaving, passing through, and not exploring enough to be called explorers. On our trips, they're the ones that arrive to sleep and leave the next morning. Visitors stay a bit longer and look around more. Shoppers do, too. Tourists moving through buy gas and maybe a few sundries, but not much else. They might stop at big attractions, museums and quaint shops.

I think it is the clothes my opinion anyway when me brother came to visit by the way he lives in Washington State he looked like a tourist to me and gave him a hard time for that lol what fun can have when smiles are around wonderful work warm hugs, Linda Kaye

Interesting question!

Darn good question. To me technically you are a tourist as soon as you leave your own area and go into a new one, even several times to the same place, to me you have to live there, not to be consider a tourist. Of course though I do not use the word myself for others, but, for myself especially when I was outside conus, I am always the tourist, always gawking at something. Mostly I just call tourist(?}, out of staters, junk collectors (antique collectors}, foreigners, city slickers (they must be from Chicago, St. Louis, etc.), what can I say, goes with the area here.

To early in the morning for me to think...Glad to see your mind still ticking on ideas...I'm a homebody

WOW. This is an intriguing question that reminds me of a few conversations I had with friends like Katja, Pavl, and others. I think that a tourist is someone who sees life from a somewhat specific perspective...you can be a tourist in your own city after all. It seems to me that what constitutes a tourist is a complex play of impulses, most of which involve the act of collect trophies and bragging rights of some sort. I've noticed that tourists often appear in their own pictures as much as any famous landmark while travelers, residents on holiday, photographers, and Pavl (that guy is his own category of human, all by himself!) seem more interested in the act of exploring, or recording something for posterity (even if no one sees what they've collected) and/or experiencing the daily life of the locals, whoever they may be. Tourists usually carry an envelope of their home territory around them, and more often than not, point a lot, wear uniforms of a sort (lots of Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein or the non-American equivalent,) and have the superhuman ability to find a restaurant that serves the food from their home town/city/country. Tourists (as opposed to travelers, visitors, wanderers, and Pavl) generally won't strike out on their own and get lost on purpose. They also have more money to spend on...whatever it is that tourists buy. I found myself thinking the same thoughts and raising the same questions when I lived in the Czech Republic, and well...many Czechs didn't seem to think I was a tourist at all. Or, as Pavl would say it: Tourists stop living their normal lives and bring their attitudes with them wherever they go...Tourists ask if you can drink the water, as if drinkable water exists only in their country. Travelers and others, consider visiting other places and mingling among other people to be their normal lives...and even if they go to Prague, for example to see a clock, a castle, and an old bridge, they aren't going to go away from Prague thinking that they've actually seen anything...Okay, Pavl wouldn't have said it exactly like that, but that's the gist of it, and I agree. There's probably more, but I've already written a lot, so I'll just shut up now.

Tourists. They're not really from here, are they? What are you going to do? Lead them down a dark alley and steal their traveler's checks? (Only kidding.) Don't get me wrong, I'm all for travel, exploring, expanding your horizons and all that, but I try to be more stealthy about it: blend in, go native, talk to people, not at them. Eat the local cuisine, drink the local beer, have sex with the natives, take a lot of fun photos, etc. Tourists, by nature, don't fit in and the worst of them stick out like a horribly mangled arm. Maybe it's the clothes, the posture, the attitude, the obnoxious cluenessness. Tourists are the only people who stand in the middle of airports and yell: "ETHEL! THE PLANE IS LEAVING!" Or leave Milwaukee, fly to Paris, and eat at McDonalds. A warped part of my brain tends to envision them as 19th century Christian missionaries, trying to convert "the Indians." The radio station in my head just started playing Joe Jackson's "The Jet Set..." Can you say it in English? / We're the Jet Set, get out of our way...

Ok Marilyn, she begged for this: If you are driving on the wrong side of the road, you are a tourist! If you are an Omgamerican, you are a tourist, if you address me as "ole chap", you're a tourist. If you pay through your neck in a curio shop without complaining, or counting your money doing the currency conversion thing, you are a tourist. I suppose if you don't do any of these. you may be a tourist... :D:D:D

all is said here, and I agree with you ;o)

LOL.. Okay, to me you can do "touristy" things and not be a tourist. A tourist is being away from home and constitutes a stay at a hotel/motel/bed and breakfast... whatever.. just not your own bed ;) Unless of course, you are staying with friends, then you are a visitor. ...and that is the short version of my opinion.. hehe.

Tara, I like when you question things. Make us think and we try to explain it a best we can according to our own thinking regardless what lexicons say about it. Here is mine humble oppinion. If I go and spend a weekend in a city 100km away from my home I call my self a tourist. I have little idea about good restaurant or great buildings to look at and of course taking photos of it. I realy need a map to find my place and a parking lot where I left my car. In my local place 10-25km radius (realy not much to do with km)I know every corner, every tree. I can not call myself a tourist. If my friend coming and spend some days with me. Na this is tricky a bit depend which side we looking the tourist question. For me she/he is my overseas visitor. For strange ppl she/he is a tourist.

I've been pondering this for a week and the short answer is - if I leave the house with my camera, I AM A TOURIST. Unless I am off to visit some grandchildren and then I'm just a grandfather. Dana.

Tourists are not involved with the place they are. "Yo, Outlander, you picked up that trash. Thanks. Now you're one of us."

Ah! So the woman enjoys moving through thoughts that evoke deep responses. Nice. It is possible to be both a tourist (one who looks at new sights), and a traveler who looks at new and old sights in new ways. It is how you see things and ways that they change you because you saw them that makes the difference. Collecting new cities, museums, eateries, countries with them without changing you classifies one as a tourist. To be change by ones explorations is the point of experience, new or old. benjamin