Tourist Trap Quotes

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Do you know who I am?" she demanded. "Well, you're Night, I suppose," said Annabeth. "I mean, I can tell because you're dark and everything, though the brochure didn't say much about you." Nyx's eyes winked out for a moment. "What brochure?" Annabeth patted her pockets. "We had one, didn't we?" Percy licked his lips. "Uh-huh." He was still watching the horses, his hand tight on his sword hilt, but he was smart enough to follow Annabeth's lead. [...] "Anyway," she said, "I guess the brochure didn't say much, because you weren't spotlighted on the tour. We got to see the River Phlegethon, the Cocytus, the arai, the poison glade of Akhlys, even some random Titans and giants, but Nyx...hmm, no you weren't really featured." "Featured? Spotlighted?" "Yeah," Percy said, warming up to the idea. "We came down here for the Tartarus tour--like, exotic destinations, you know? The Underworld is overdone. Mount Olympus is a tourist trap--" "Gods, totally!" Annabeth agreed. "So we booked the Tartarus excursion, but no one even mentioned we'd run into Nyx. Huh. Oh, well. Guess they didn't think you were important.
Rick Riordan (The House of Hades (The Heroes of Olympus, #4))
If you hold anger in your heart, it just turns to evil. You have to be able to see the good in people, even those people in whom you think there isn’t even a speck of good left.
Lynn Cahoon (Killer Run (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #5))
It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid.
Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. The third time as tourist trap.
Sarah Vowell
I think any reading is good reading, even if it's commercial fiction. A good story well told is worth the time
Lynn Cahoon (If the Shoe Kills (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #3))
Fat green frogs, the eternally grinning type destined to be shellacked into bizarre poses while wearing mariachi hats and holding toy trumpets and guitars and then sold in tourist traps all over Mexico, jostled lazily in the dappled shadows.
Luis Alberto Urrea (Into the Beautiful North)
A date is a place, a destination. March 5th, 1982 is the ideal tourist trap.
Jarod Kintz (At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.)
As much as I loved my computer, I wondered if I would ever know the joy of getting a letter from someone I loved, being able to pour over its contents time and time again, to feel the paper that he touched, and to know he took the time to share his day.
Lynn Cahoon (Guidebook to Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery #1))
Roswell, New Mexico, the town where an alien spaceship had supposedly crashed and been covered up by the Air Force.  HOME OF THE MOST BIZARRE CONSPIRACY IN U.S. HISTORY, a sign on one of the tourist traps said.
Mike Wells (Wild Child: The Trilogy)
We make the best choices we can at the time we make them.
Lynn Cahoon (If the Shoe Kills (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #3))
Nothing is more hip than a corpse. The style is timeless. Death is trending.
Chris Campanioni (Tourist Trap)
Sometimes life was a vicious circle. The things we love can draw us nearer to the things we hate.
Lynn Cahoon (If the Shoe Kills (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #3))
You get attached to an author’s world building and you just want to stay in their reality.
Lynn Cahoon (Murder on Wheels (A Tourist Trap Mystery #6))
Now, re-reading Macauley by firelight, Sammy Tigertail struggled to envision the noble and fiercely insulated culture so admiringly documented in those pages. He wondered what the journalist-preacher would say about the twenty-first century clans that eagerly beckoned outsiders to tribal gambling halls, tourist traps and drive-through cigarette kiosks. For not the first time the young man contemplated the crushing likelihood that the warrior he aspired to become had no place to go.
Carl Hiaasen (Nature Girl)
I told her how I’d taken to going on long midday walks to savor the fall weather; wandering in and out of the familiar tourist traps on Yarrow Street, getting lunch at Golden’s or the new sandwich place with the incredible falafel wraps. Dipping into the funky coffee shop Talia had taken me to, exploring the new galleries, jewelry stores, and boutiques that had sprung up in my absence. I’d even picnicked by myself next to Lady’s Lake, in sunshine so pure it felt medicinal, and taken a book and a hot chocolate to the town cemetery like I’d once loved to do, whiling away an entire afternoon. Slowly falling back under Thistle Grove’s spell without even putting up a fight.
Lana Harper (Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1))
Trip Advisor: Travel America with Haiku [Texas] Grackles roosting, sentinels on miles of phone line. Don't Mess with Texas. Austin rush hour, "Go down Mopac. You don't wanna mess with I-35." Athens, Texas, Blackeyed Pea Capital of the World. Yup, just another shithole. Killeen, Texas, Kill City, Boyz from Fort Hood. Spending every paycheck. Texas A&M;, Aggies football, the wired 12th man. Too lazy to plant in the Spring. Fredericksburg, Texas. Polka Capital of Texas but I could swear I saw Hitler there. Ft. Worth, Texas, Where the West Begins and a great place to leave. San Antonio, Texas, Fiesta! Alamo City! Northstar Mall! I've been to better tourist traps. Dallas, Texas, D-Town, City of Hate. Don't miss the Galleria. Lubbock, Texas, Oil wells, Hub of the Plains. Stinks like an armpit. Waco, Texas, The Buckle of the Bible Belt. Lossen it up a notch. Neck dragon tattoo, piercings, purple haired kindergarten teacher. Keep Austin weird.
Beryl Dov
That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.
James Baldwin (Another Country)
But mostly, finally, ultimately, I'm here for the weather. As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tent to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk - although, depending on the bite in the wind, they're times when it's more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there's a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather. In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call "drizzle" are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. "What's so hot about the sun?" I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don't belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they were locals. Which, of course, they are.
Tom Robbins (Wild Ducks Flying Backward)
Soap is a waste of time too. What good is soap in a zombie situation? Soap sometimes imagines himself trapped in his mother’s soap boutique. Zombies are coming out of the surf, dripping wet, hellishly hungry, always so fucking slow, shuffling hopelessly up through the sand of Manhattan Beach. Soap has barricaded himself in Float with his mother and some blond Japanese tourists with surfboards. “Do something, sweetheart!” his mother implores. So Sweetheart throws water all over the floor. There’s the surfboards, a baseball bat under the counter, some rolls of quarters, and a swordfish mounted up on the wall, but Sweetheart decides the cash register is best for bashing. He tells the Japanese tourists to get down on their hands and knees and rub soap all over the floor. When the zombies finally find a way into Float, his mother and the tourists can hide behind the counter. The zombies will slip all over the floor and Sweetheart will bash them in the head with the cash register. It will be just like a Busby Berkeley zombie musical.
Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners: Stories)
evening.” “I’ll have you know, I made the deposit. Check online if you don’t believe
Lynn Cahoon (Tea Cups and Carnage (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #7))
But seriously, Gracie. You can’t let people walk all over you. They’re just people. What right do they have?
Emma Harrison (Tourist Trap)
Ferrets and falls were the theme of the holiday. The falls part did not disappoint. In fact, it more than made up for the disastrous ferret segment. Griff finally understood why Luna insisted they visit Niagara on the return trip. When you stood out on the walkway, gazing at Horseshoe Falls, at the overwhelming power of it, your own thoughts didn’t matter. It was cleansing, in its way. They walked up and down the promenade for hours in the bitter cold. It was too incredible to step away. Eventually they needed to warm up. Griff had booked the hotel. When they entered the room, Luna saw that it had a full view of the falls. Griff ordered room service while Luna stood in front of the window, feeling so happy it started to turn on her. Happiness could easily shift gears into guilt or shame. She was on the precipice of the shift. Griff could see it happening. He stood next to Luna, put his arm around her. “You think it’s just going to be bullshit, a cliché, a tourist trap from hell,” he said. “And yet it’s—” “It’s all that and still the most beautiful thing you’ll ever see,” said Luna. “You want to stay another night?” Griff asked. “Do you?” “I could stay here forever,” he said.
Lisa Lutz (The Accomplice)
Types of India E-Tourist Visa and Validity Travelers have three types of e-tourist visas to choose from, including a 5 year, a 1-year, and a 1-month tourist visa.
EVISA
Of course what the German tourists never saw was that Greece was full of hard-working ants struggling to survive during those years of miraculous growth rates. Low-wage workers and pensioners were being told that they’d never had it so good; that their real wages and living standards were rising. Only they did not feel that way. And they were right.11 Whereas richer Greeks, who lived well off the back of German and French bank loans, prospered, poorer Greeks fell increasingly into a poverty trap. In the good times! And when the bad times came in 2010, they were told that they had been profligate grasshoppers who had
Yanis Varoufakis (And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future)
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing. “You were hurt. Hurt people, like hurt animals, lash out at times.” I was glad Toby
Lynn Cahoon (Murder on Wheels (A Tourist Trap Mystery #6))
Some people travel for the culture, or the place’s history, or the sheer experience. Our aim is total dissolution. We travel from Egypt to Estonia, big clunky blocks of metal hanging from our necks, naïve and stuttering and asking all the right questions at all the right times—“Is this the Great Wall I’ve been hearing so much about?”—flashing a few photos and no one looks twice, except maybe to point and laugh but we are just harmless Americans come for a tour of life on the other side.
Chris Campanioni (Tourist Trap)
add-on to Phoenix, part faux cowboy tourist trap—the West’s Most Western Town—part artist’s colony. Now it sucked up capital, development, and retail sales from the center city like an Electrolux. Yet it never seemed like a happy place. The politics were poison. Every section and street seemed to vie for the power to look down on everybody else. Scottsdale wanted to be Santa Fe or South Beach, but it was neither artistic nor sexy. Nobody would set a cop show in Scottsdale. A golf or plastic surgery show, maybe. I suffered the unending traffic jam south past
Jon Talton (The Night Detectives: A David Mapstone Mystery)
To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni (Tourist Trap)
The convenient function of every celebrated machine for living is to produce machines to live in them.
Chris Campanioni (Tourist Trap)
On March 13, 1957, with guns blazing, they exited their vehicles and attacked the unwary guards at the Presidential Palace. Running, the attackers stormed into the dining room and then on to the offices on the lower level, only to find them empty. Since the elevator was up on the third floor of the building, the attackers were momentarily stymied. Although they had previously studied a floor plan of the palace, they became disoriented, perhaps from the intense fighting that had already claimed about ten of their number. An equal number or more of the president’s elite guards also lay dead on the presidential grounds. For a moment those attackers still alive had difficulty in locating the grand marble staircase to the second floor. Once they did, they were repelled by a hail of gunfire from the guardsmen, now fully aware of what was happening. When Carlos Menoyo was fatally hit on the stairs, Menelao Mora Morales took charge of the assault and managed to ascend to the top of the stairs, where he also was shot dead. About nine men made it to the second floor, but without leadership, they didn’t know where to go from there. Trapped on the second floor, they searched for a way out. The hapless, amateur warriors couldn’t retreat down the stairs where their leaders lay and where the shooting was still intense. Stuck, they didn’t know how to get up to the third floor or back down the staircase and out of the building. Batista was on the upper floor with his family, as the remaining attackers were now being methodically killed. To them the third floor could only be reached by elevator, which was effectively being kept in place at the top of the lift shaft, thus preventing the assault from reaching Batista and his family. Although some few managed to escape during the next few hours, thirty-five of the attackers were killed in and around the palace. A final count revealed that five of the palace guards were killed along with one tourist, who just happened to be there at the wrong time. Only three of the rebels managed to find a way out and escaped.
Hank Bracker
Who cares? I’m an old woman. No one corrects an old woman. We can get away with anything.
Lynn Cahoon (Mission to Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery #2))
Well, he was moving a friend. Tony. Except,
Lynn Cahoon (Mission to Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery #2))
located in El Paseo, a slightly old-world marketplace downtown. Traditional Spanish architecture and winding adobe hallways led to quaint gift shops and jewelry stores. It was old-world meets tourist trap.
Lee Nichols (Hand-Me-Down)
Working with people made me like my books so much more.
Lynn Cahoon (Guidebook to Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery #1))
of uniformed and plain-clothed officers, and a tent, and the allure was too much to resist. Even the tourists were ignoring two of the region’s most iconic views—the booming image of Mount Rainier dominating the
Robert Dugoni (The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite, #4))
When it comes to the teachingless teachings, you have to take your business to Zen and Advaita, being careful to avoid the tourist traps where you can unwittingly walk in circles for years or lifetimes. For instance, Ramana Maharshi prescribed the use of the inquiry “Who am I?” to be used relentlessly as an auger for drilling down through all the layers of ego and delusion. But this process of self-inquiry has itself become mired in layers of ego and delusion; repackaged for mass consumption. Ramana’s students have become teachers, and their students have become teachers, and the diamond at the core—the process of self-inquiry—has become the cheese in a dozen bait-and-switch operations. Those lured in by the simplicity and directness of self-inquiry are sucked into a morass of teachers and teachings, gurus and babble, ego and delusion, from which they are not likely to soon emerge. Five words: Ask yourself “Who am I?” Five words that render all other words—including those of Ramana Maharshi—superfluous. Five words that need no explanation, no amplification, no elucidation. Five words that bestow upon the recipient self-reliance and self-determination. But a complete spiritual teaching that fits on a matchbook cover is not what anyone really wants. No fame, fortune and following for the giver, no wiggle room for the receiver. And by what mechanism does such a simple thing as self-inquiry get mangled and bloated beyond all recognition? Ego. Always ego. The
Jed McKenna (Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing (The Enlightenment Trilogy Book 1))
The kitchen is a mishmash of bright colored things and well-tended houseplants. The curtains are embroidered with tulips, the fridge plastered with tourist trap magnets. By the back door there’s a concrete statue of a woman carrying a jug on her head, a spider plant spilling its offspring like a veil over her face. A chain of ivy starts in a jar on a shelf over the sink and travels along the wall on hooks for half the room. The salt and pepper shakers on the table are dachshunds wearing hot dog buns.
Allison Larkin (The People We Keep)
Germans have a term, Fernweh, that signifies “yearning for a distant place.” Having grown up in small-town Ohio, almost literally in the middle of a cornfield, I’ve always had a particularly strong sense of Fernweh. When I went to college, I took every opportunity to travel, working in Hawaii with dolphins, attending a semester abroad in England, and even backpacking through Greece. There have been countless vacations and trips. The world is a vast and infinitely interesting place, and in truth, I’ve always looked down on people who chose not to wander, not to see and experience different cultures. Maybe there was something deeply ironic in the fact that this chance encounter with an elderly Athabascan woman pushed me to reconsider my stance. She was content, serene. Could I say the same? Not really. She didn’t need to tell stories about wild sled rides to make her friends jealous; she didn’t need to supplement her life with cheap souvenirs from tourist traps. She only needed the now of the weather, the dogs, and the mushers. I wondered if all the adventures in the world could ever bring me such peace.
Lee Morgan (Four Thousand Paws: Caring for the Dogs of the Iditarod: A Veterinarian's Story)
Hell Week is something entirely different. It’s medieval and it comes at you fast, detonating in just the third week of training. When the throbbing ache in our muscles and joints was ratcheted up high and we lived day and night with an edgy, hyperventilating feeling of our breath getting out front of our physical rhythm, of our lungs inflating and deflating like canvas bags squeezed tight in a demon’s fists, for 130 hours straight. That’s a test that goes way beyond the physical and reveals your heart and character. More than anything, it reveals your mindset, which is exactly what it’s designed to do. All of this happened at the Naval Special Warfare Command Center on prissy-ass Coronado Island, a Southern California tourist trap that tucks into slender Point Loma and shelters the San Diego Marina from the open Pacific Ocean.
David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
Tourists and travellers are two sides of the same coin living in a symbiotic relationship of mutual contempt but actually dependent on each other. Without the infrastructure of tourism, being a traveller would be much harder work and much more expensive; without the frontier spirit of travellers, tourists would be trapped in the same old places, not knowing where the next new destination is. In the end there’s no big difference. Tourist, traveller – many people are both, even on the same trip.
Diccon Bewes (Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart)
I glanced around but didn’t see anything that would tell me why this was listed as the corporate office address.
Lynn Cahoon (Picture Perfect Frame (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #12))
I liked doing laundry. It calmed me in some weird way. Take something dirty and stained and make that all go away. Too bad life wasn’t like that.
Lynn Cahoon (Killer Party (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #9))
Eating ice cream out of the container for dinner did one amazing thing for cleanup. There wasn’t any. Well, except for the spoon.
Lynn Cahoon (Murder in Waiting (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #11))
India is a place where all states have their different cultures, rituals, traditions, histories, philosophy, family structure and marriage , foods, visual arts, popular media, Clothing, festivals, languages , dance, music. If you want to explore all of these things with the help of one Indian visa. Apply for e- tourist visa India ✈️
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Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing
Wes Moore (The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates)
There is something unique that unites the capitals of ancient empires. Just think of Rome, Venice, or Vienna, to give three examples. Once places of immense power and wealth, these great cities fell into decline and were condemned to a sweet irrelevance. Once open, cosmopolitan, and multiethnic, they are now provincial and self-absorbed. Proud of their past but trapped in it. Tourists treat these cities like open-air museums or amusement parks, enjoying the beautiful millenary patina without seeing beyond the surface.
W.S. Mahler (The Testament of Elias: An Archaeological Thriller (Provenance Book 1))
I’m thinking of calling it “The Forgotten Bookshop”. What do you think?’ ‘Very poetic.’ Arnaud raised his glass. ‘We should be breaking out the Champagne.’ ‘I’d like people to feel as though they’ve found a place off the beaten track that the locals know about, rather than a tourist trap,’ Juliette said. ‘I want this shop to become part of the community, with maybe a book club, and poetry readings, and writers dropping by.
Daisy Wood (The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris)
If you complain, you have to bring a workable solution, or there’s no complaining.
Lynn Cahoon (Songs of Wine and Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #15))
The moral of the story is to be happy with what you have. It can always be worse.
Lynn Cahoon (Songs of Wine and Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery, #15))
Never trust a man who drives a Prius,” I said to the empty porch.
Lynn Cahoon (Guidebook to Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery #1))
These are the nuggets, the horror-film fan’s reward for sifting through films like Planet of the Vampires and The Monster from Green Hell. My own “discovery” (if you don’t object to the word) is a little film called Tourist Trap, starring Chuck Connors. Connors himself isn’t very good in the film—he tries gamely, but he’s simply miscast. Yet the film wields an eerie, spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort; there are a number of effective, atmospheric shots of the dummies’ blank eyes and reaching hands, and the special effects are effective. As a film that deals with the queer power that inanimate dummies, mannequins, and human replicas can sometimes cast over us, it is a more effective film than the expensive and ill-advised film made from William Goldman’s bestseller, Magic.
Stephen King (Danse Macabre)
We loved the wide-open west. Our explorations of the numinous Canadian landscape fed the songs, and our souls. We caught the west in the last of its wild state. Many of the songs I wrote in the seventies reflect our travels through the great expanse of the Canadian prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, to the moisture-rich West Coast. Space was everywhere, and there is space in the songs. Everything wasn’t a tourist trap yet, clear-cutting was not so evident, and agribusiness hadn’t completely killed off the family farm. In the first couple of years that Kitty, Aroo, and I travelled westward from Ontario, we were practically the only road campers out there. Seldom did we run across anyone else travelling the way we were. The prairies were full of abandoned old farmhouses—no families to be seen—harbingers of the reversion to feudal agricultural economics. All around the land still looked wild. Our journeys offered at least the illusion of freedom, as well as a deep sense of the land as Divine creation. Soon, though, we were seeing the spaces fill up with scabrous industrial sites, hotels, housing developments, shopping opportunities. We’d watch like gawkers at a train wreck as the land was eaten up before our eyes by inevitable human expansion and greed. There were ever more rules about where you could park your camper. It was the tail end of an epoch when the land was open and it, and we, could breathe freely. That will never come again.
Bruce Cockburn (Rumours of Glory: A Memoir)
The green minivan had a metallic sign proclaiming The Good Fence Company. Like anyone would name their company The Shoddy Work and Don’t Give a Shit Fence Company.
Lynn Cahoon (Guidebook to Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery #1))
No use worrying about tomorrow—there’s plenty to keep you busy today.
Lynn Cahoon (Guidebook to Murder (A Tourist Trap Mystery #1))
For the canny traveler, the map is dotted with tourist traps that were once something sincere, something worthy of reverence that gave way to branded merchandise. We follow the billboards that are as accurate as those guiding us to the Corn Palace or the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, kick at the dirt a bit, watch an overinflated PowerPoint or squint at a dusty artifact, peek at the gift shop, and go home with less money but nothing in value gained. These sites are mental stamps that one was in a place where something had once mattered, but the veil between Then and Now is thick and impermeable.
Thomm Quackenbush (Holidays with Bigfoot)
To keep your kid safe from polar bears in the Arctic Circle, don't take your kids to the Arctic Circle. Seriously, what kind of vacation is that? There are no major theme parks, and Santa's workshop is just one big tourist trap. Try Hawaii instead.
James Breakwell (How to Save Your Child from Ostrich Attacks, Accidental Time Travel, and Anything Else that Might Happen on an Average Tuesday)
If you head too far north, you’ll land in some variety of tourist trap, whether it’s Lombard Street or Fisherman’s Wharf or, if you’re really unfortunate, the Marina.
Lisa Lutz (The Spellman Files (The Spellmans, #1))
Having been married twice before, Ernest Hemingway enjoyed the conveniences and trappings of having a wife, but resented the responsibilities, not to mention the constraints, of raising children. He loved his six-toed, polydactyl cats that required far less care, and frequently were left to fend for themselves at his home in Key West, Florida. Writing was his life and having been a reporter and journalist for the Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star Weekly gave him the experience and knowledge needed to write the gritty accounts of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. His work took Papa Hemingway to the far reaches of the globe; however he enjoyed life in Key West where he had fishing friends and drinking buddies. He always enjoyed the company of the people he was with, and Sloppy Joes was his favorite haunt. It was here that he spent hours imbibing and sharing stories with fishermen, beach bums and tourists.
Hank Bracker
The pub off George Square is a tourist trap. Inside it’s all tartan upholstery and claymores on the walls. Soft rock music is playing slightly too loud from tiny white speakers screwed into the ceiling. Giant blackboards show the menu of steak and chips, haggis and whisky-flavoured ice cream. It seems very expensive to Margo but that’s probably because it serves visitors to the city who don’t know that better food is available two streets away for half the price. It’s quiet. The five o’clock rush is over but the evening hasn’t begun. There are only two other customers: men sitting away from each other in the far corners of the L-shaped room, pretending to read newspapers but really just killing themselves with drink.
Denise Mina (The Less Dead)
Why did the city's most notable attraction have to be so "bonery?
Jason June (Jay's Gay Agenda)
NEW COVENT Garden is where old Covent Garden went when it switched from being London’s major fruit, vegetable, and flower market to being a refurbished tourist trap with a rather good opera house attached. It’s across the river at Nine Elms, so I took the Chelsea Bridge as the lesser of two evils—nobody goes across Vauxhall Bridge in the morning unless they’re new in town or working for MI6.
Ben Aaronovitch (Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London #3))