It's Easy Being Green

My wife and I like to travel. Usually it's during the summer, and we recently returned from a tour of Ireland.[i] It's green as advertised. (But so are my lawn and meadows that I've seen along the road in many of the places we've traveled.) I suppose there were shamrocks there but I didn't look. There also were plenty of clouds and almost daily rain – though I must admit that the rains tended to last for only a few minutes each day. There was also quite a bit of sunshine between the episodes of rain. And it was cool. It was mid-August, but the daytime temperatures were usually in the sixties.[ii]

I don't say this as a matter of criticism. We enjoyed our time on the Emerald Isle, but the green on which it prides itself was nothing unusual, requiring only decent weather and fertile fields. It was nice, but it seemed to be more a marketing tool than something out of the ordinary. There were other attractions that contributed to our enjoyment – both those which gave us the feeling of being in Ireland, and those with specific historical dimensions. But familiar as it seemed, the trip itself, not Ireland, was the feature that seemed most worthy of note. And the people who accompanied us.

“Familiar as it seemed.” When we were young, my wife and I would plan our own vacations – all the details and arrangements – and go by ourselves to some unknown and, perhaps, exotic locale in which we would try to be inconspicuous as we soaked up the region's culture and enjoy its fare. We weren't very successful, however. Neither of us is all that good with languages, so our travel was mainly to places where English was the primary tongue. Even then we were recognizable tourists, not blending in very well. And because we limited ourselves to kosher food, and restaurants available to us at the time were few, we wound up having the same meals irrespective of our destination, and much of it was made by us from ingredients we either brought along or obtained from a nearby supermarket. There was a lot of work with relatively little return in terms of what we were looking for.

So we changed our approach. Beginning a couple of decades ago we started going on packaged tours. They were more expensive[iii] than what we could do on our own, but we decided that they made more sense for us. There was less planning of itineraries and bookings; there was less concern about where we'd get food; and there was no concern about being inconspicuous. We were tourists and we never hid it very well anyway.

But the tours introduced us to something we hadn't anticipated – other people. Not that we didn't expect people to be on the tours, but we didn't anticipate that they'd be so difficult to please. And their criticisms seem to extend to all parties. Some of them are even justified, but they seem to be the same irrespective of the tour. I'll list a few of them to illustrate the flavor:

1. “The food isn't good enough.” It doesn't matter how good the food is, it's never good enough.

2. “The tour guide doesn't know enough about what he (or she) is showing us.” The suspicion is that he's staying one page ahead in the guide book.

3. “There's too much time spent traveling and not enough seeing things.” What there is to see may be visible while traveling, and it was listed in the tour's brochure, but the passengers aren't interested in that.

4. “Other members of the tour are taking all the good seats on the bus and I can't see everything.”[iv] A good seat should be saved for them no matter when they come.

5. “We're not seeing what we paid for.” By and large the tourists know little about what they paid for and wouldn't recognize it anyway, and they ignore the reality that weather conditions may have dictated a change in plans, or that what they were seeing is better. If it isn't exactly what it said in the brochure they're being cheated.

6. “The tour isn't well organized.” This is a general complaint and may relate to anything – usually reflecting more about the complainer than the tour.

7. “There isn't enough consideration of the needs of the passengers.” At this point whoever is complaining tells the world of his own wishes and assumes that everyone agrees.

8. “There's too much (or not enough) time spent shopping.”

9. “They're going too fast (or too slowly).”

10. “There's too much wasted time.”[v]

It's usually the case that only a few passengers are dissatisfied, but they repeat their complaints over and over. They'll often speak about previous tours they took and how good they were, though it's hard not to assume that they did the same the last time they traveled. But most annoying is the fact that the complainers will bewail the lack of support they are getting. They'll consider their tour mates too timid to complain. It will never cross their minds that they might be wrong and that others might disagree. They seem to be trying to foment rebellion. And by doing so they make things unpleasant for the rest of us.

That's my biggest complaint – not the tour but a few of the people on it, the professional malcontents. They need to kiss the Blarney Stone and start to say nice things – even if they don't believe them.

Next episode: “In His Image” – Imagine that.

[i]          We also went to Israel but that's irrelevant to what I want to say.

[ii]          Fahrenheit. They measure in Celsius though, and 16 to 18 degrees was the usual high.

[iii]          More green, as it were.

[iv]         On some tours the seats will be rotated so everyone gets to view the sights from the front, back, and the middle.

[v]        Full disclosure: This is a complaint that I, myself, often have (and I'll list another soon) and it often results from the lack of consideration of other tour members who do not appear at the but or at other sites at the specified times.  They sometimes apologize for being late, but repeat their behavior later.