Tourist Season
Must we endure another dispatch from “Cassady Caution” complaining about tourists? Without visitors, the North Bay economy would collapse faster than a tipsy bachelorette climbing out of the fountain in the Plaza.
Tourists fill our hotels, restaurants, tasting rooms, boutiques and parking spaces. Yes, especially the parking spaces. They arrive with money and leave with a hangover and a mystery wine club membership. This is called “commerce.”
Remove tourism and what remains? Grapevines, unaffordable houses and thousands of hospitality workers doomscrolling on their phones. Our charming downtowns would become ghost towns, and every farm-to-table restaurant would be tabled until it bought the farm.
Yet Caution keeps greeting our economic lifeblood as if it were an invasive species. Worse, you keep publishing her complaints. At this rate, she and her editorial enablers will single-handedly turn Wine Country into Whine Country.
There is a place where she can enjoy fewer tourists, less traffic and all the parking her heart desires. It’s called Clear Lake.
Tom Tinnitus
Healdsburg
Necessary Caution
Cheers for Cassady Caution, who continues to say what many North Bay residents think but dare not utter.
Yes, our visitors spend money. They also drive like idiots (how many storefronts have we lost this year alone?) and drive up prices for locals who are expected to smile graciously while waiting 40 minutes for brunch in their own hometown because some twit needs to Instagram an egg.
Meanwhile, every modest diner becomes a “culinary destination,” every shed becomes a “rustic retreat” and every patch of dirt with two folding chairs becomes a $600-a-night “immersive agritourism experience.” It’s a scam, and Cassady says so.
Tamsin Waites
Mill Valley
