Deep Tourism
I coined this this morning on hearing the tale of my colleague John who went to Stuttgart with work. He tried to go to a concert one evening but spent the whole evening doing laps of stuttgart in the dark trying to find a hotel. As a result, he didn’t see much of stuttgart, but he saw a lot of the small part he did see!
It tied in with thoughts I was having yesterday. I’ve become one of those most hated inhabitants of britain: a Sunday Driver. On the plus side, I tend to hurtle around at 60 or 70, rather than the more traditional 37mph… but I realised that despite this being my ninth year in York, I know very little about the surrounding geography and villages. Since having the spitfire though, I look for excuses to go for a drive on sundays, and I’ve been going for unplanned drives, turning down likely (or unlikely) looking lanes and ending up at village pubs for sunday lunch. I realised yesterday that I’m a kind of tourist in the sense that I’m doing little tours, though I live locally. So I figure if I keep this up I’ll have an intimate knowledge of all the little villages surrounding York. A sort of narrow, but deep local knowledge. And I should always know where I can get a roast dinner.