Tomorrow is the last day of my family's fantastic two week trip to Italy. Thanks to a lot of preparation and the resources on this forum and from Rick Steves and his books, we have had a trip full of memories to last a lifetime. We have also had many unexpected opportunities to learn life lessons on this trip. One thing we have discussed with our children a lot is the joy found in travel for the sake of learning more about our world and the lives of people who live other places. I have always used the Rick Steves guide books because he does such a good job of encouraging this.
After Roberto's post about the rude Americans today, I was catching up on a little NY Times reading during our "siesta" break this afternoon and came across the article below. Our family has witnessed too much of this - not the "drunk tours" so much as the extremely self-centered nature of so many travelers these days. As the article says, these travelers believe that since they paid for their vacations, they are entitled to do as they please wherever they are. This was perfectly illustrated many times over our two weeks, including in the Vatican Museum by a group of women with selfie sticks and giant dark sunglasses, bashing other tourists (including my children and I) repeatedly in the head so they could get the perfect poses of themselves in front of Michaelangelo's Pieta.
The readers of this forum are probably not the ones who need to read this article - unfortunately, I doubt the worst offenders read much of anything, including guide books or newspapers. But I think that many here will find this interesting:
Full trip report coming soon! One last day in lovely Venice . . . . .