I live in Maine, so I can sort of understand your frustration.

psssst

What does that mean, kodama?

Who will think of the geese that gave them the down for the jackets they wear?

Goddamn tourists! Amirite?

Tourism happens.

I used to live right in the middle of Sydney and the Olympic games were a nightmare. People who would happily drop a couple of hundred dollars on even tickets wouldn't spring for $20 worth of parking. I was lucky if I could find parking within three blocks of my house. One particularly bad night I ended up abandoning my car in a shopping centre a couple of kilometres away and taking my chances with the dealers and gangs and just walked home.

But at least that was a one-off. That sort of shit gets old fast - I can't imagine dealing with it every damn year. I'm afraid I'd be out there in balaclava and hoodie, keying every fucking car within the block that wasn't a local.

(By which I mean I'd actually be inside bitching to friends and not actually doing a damn thing.)

*sigh*

Perhaps you should collect obnoxious white-supremacy bumper stickers and apply liberally?

Have you considered making an independant film about event parking?

I want to be a Sundance poser. I was watching coverage and thinking, "How do I get in?"

I feel your pain about tourists. I don't leave the house during race week.

That's why I'm glad that have permit parking in my neighborhood. We live withing parking distance from two stadiums, a community college, a casino, five museums and later this year, a 5500 seat amphitheater. If it weren't for the permit parking system, there wouldn't be parking within ten blocks during event days.

A friend who lived in Ann Arbor used to have a scam that he and some others worked during the U of Michigan football games. They would make a cardboard sign that said "Parking $5." Then they would go to a neighborhood with big front yards. Everybody was at the game so nobody was home. They'd hold up the sign, collect $5, wave the car onto somebody's front yard. As each yard filled up, they'd work down the street. Then they'd go and drink their ill gotten gains.

Profiting from adversity.

My dad ran an ice cream store at the beach, that the family all worked in.

On one had we (the neighborhood kids) had an ingrained hatred of all the inlanders who came to the beach, and on the other hand, my family made its living off them.

On summer mornings, we would lay out a baseball field on the beach and play hardball (the strand wall was a home run. . .a broken window was the cost of doing business, we figured) and people would gradually show up and set their towels and umbrellas in our outfield.

A few people got hit by batted balls, and were very upset, but we (we were maybe like nine or ten years old) just shrugged and told them that we were there first and they should not be laying in our outfield.

My world-view was simpler, back then.

My world-view was simpler, back then.

Word. We bitch about tourists here too, and certainly did about "bennies" on the Jersey Shore when I was a kid. But at this point in life, I'm aware that they're the single biggest reason my town is nice. So we really enjoy winter, because we have an incredibly nice place to ourselves. In summer, it's still incredibly nice, but more crowded.