You look at my town, you’ll see what everyone else sees. Lake Houses, cute small town shops, and a beautiful lake. But what they don’t see is what all the locals see, tourist ruining our town. We use to have a beautiful arcade down town that my friends and I would go to on the weekends or even take my dad there. It felt like a safe place for us kids to hang out because usually all the parks were being replaced with either banks or big useless companies that would just end up going bankrupt. Back to the arcade though, the adults decided to sell the building and put in a huge tourist tshirt shop and a stupid frozen yogurt shop that this town does not need, we have Yogueez which is actually good. But our town was taking away any sign that there are teens in this town and make it look like an old time old people’s town if that makes sense.

When I went to college we had to do those stupid go around the room and tell us about yourself. I always said the same things; my name, where I am from, and my graduation class (roughly 300). The things we had to say was usually where you from, what your graduating class was or the school you went to, and who you were. The responds when I said my towns name was always the same. “You must be rich!” “Oh my god the masons are beautiful!” “Do you live on the lake?” And looking at me from the outside you would think I was one of those girls who had it all. But look closer, my towns reputation relied on maybe 30% of those masons are from the boarder people. 10% is actual town people (unfortunately some of my family) but the rest of the town is average people.

Now when I walk through the town, or drive through it, I feel like its not my town anymore. I walk into a bar or a restaurant or even my job, we are just all faking smiles to be nice to the rich annoying out of townees that try and run our town. I use to work at a big resort where we would have to smile at every horrible guest that would throw everything nasty words to us. I have been told so many nice things, like I should just go kill myself, because I couldn’t refund a third party card. But of course I just smiled my smile and apologized. These out of state people some are great! Some are horrible! But what really sucks is that they think they run our small little town. I feel bad for any nice tourist who just wants a nice vacation, and has to deal with what our town brings in.

Now I am not saying that our town is a horrible place to visit, its beautiful town to visit! But just don’t hate on the locals, we just have to deal with all the bad things that others have said to us. So if you visit, say please and thank you, use turn signals, look when you cross the street, oh and have nice things to say if we mess up something of yours.