Winter Visitors

My blog friend Kurt asked if would explain the last sentence of yesterday's post which read, Golf will be kind of a struggle until about May, when all the knuckleheads will load up their motor homes and head back to the Quad-Cities or wherever. I can never tell if Kurt is asking a serious question or messing with me, but I'll take a chance and answer the question. Our fair city reaches its peak tourist season during the January to May time period. Tourism begins to pick up in October, but doesn't really kick in until after the holidays. This is not hard to figure since we enjoy very mild, often warm winter weather. Visitors from cold climes take the opportunity to come here in winter. Our winter visitors fall primarily into two groups. Some come for a week or so and stay in the resorts or other hotels. They tend to be families or couples looking for a mid-winter vacation break. The second type of visitor spend several months here. they come before it get too cold back home and stays until the weather in Iowa or Illinois warms up in the spring. They are called snowbirds by the locals and visitors themselves. Often they arrive in giant motor homes and spend the winter among their own in one of our many fine RV parks. The typical snowbird spends about 67 days here in the winter according to our tourism bureau. I don't think we get quite as many of these visitors as we used to because of warmer winters in the cold parts of the country and because of the rising gas prices, but we still get a lot. There has even been a segment of home marketing devoted toward convincing well-to-do Midwesterners and people living in the Eastern US, to buy second homes here, just to have them available for their winter stays. Also, they are an easy bunch to piss off and if provoked, will take their tourism dollars elsewhere. A few years ago some boneheads in county government tacked a couple of dollars a day tax on space rentals in RV parks to pay for a baseball stadium and many winter visitors retaliated by going elsewhere the following winter. Winter visitors are quick to let you know how much you need them and their discretionary dollars. Golf is one area in which the winter visitors make their presence apparent. In many parts of the country, you cannot golf during the winter, so one thing that draws visitors here is year around golf. Our fair city charges significantly more for golf during the November to May period because the golf-starved visitors will pay a premium to play. Guys like me struggle to get playing time in winter due to the crush of players from out of state. Our municipal golf operation sells an all-you-can-play deal good from May through December to get locals to play in the off-season. In the winter months they couldn't care less about the locals because old guys from out of town show up in droves. When I asked a guy at one of the local courses why they didn't have an year around pass program, his frank response was that they didn't need to. So there you go. Our fair city doesn't really have that much going on economically speaking, so tourism is a big deal here. Winter visitors can create long waits for service at restaurants and local attractions, but you have to take the good with the bad. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky