Tacky Tourist Quotes

And then we went out to see the town. I was particularly eager to have a look at Gatlinburg because I had read about it in a wonderful book called The Lost Continent. In it the author describes the scene on Main Street thus: “Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice-creams, cotton candy, and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously.” And so it was today. The same throngs of pear-shaped people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and bucket-sized soft drinks. It was still the same tacky, horrible place. Yet I would hardly have recognized it from just nine years before. Nearly every building I remembered had been torn down and replaced with something new—principally, mini-malls and shopping courts, which stretched back from the main street and offered a whole new galaxy of shopping and eating opportunities. In The Lost Continent I

booths fashioned from tarps and cast-off wood, a squalid tent city that housed vendors hawking tacky artifacts and articles of second-hand clothing. A retired Greyhound coach creaked as it entered the muddy lot, carrying a handful of intrepid tourists and commuters from the coastal suburbs. The tired air brakes hissed their protest as it pulled to a stop and disgorged its cargo, the rusting, graffiti-covered

Mimi had always harbored a secret love for limousines. It was tacky to use one in the city, lest you run the risk of looking like a tourist or like you were off to prom. But this one shone with a wicked gleam. She had to admit it; the guy traveled in style

The first time Polly Platt met Jim Brooks to discuss Terms of Endear­ment (1983), she was distinctly unimpressed. “I was infuriated that he was that late,” she recalls. “Fifteen minutes or half an hour, who cares, but to be a whole hour late.” She waited for him at Gladstone’s, a tacky tourist joint on the Pacific Coast Highway. “I just remember I didn’t like him ... I just didn’t like his turn of phrase ... I didn’t like the way he referred to the people. I didn’t like the people he was talk­ing about working with.