I am a Chicagoan by birth and make no mistake, I do love Wisconsin. It is a beautiful state. But that touristy hole is not fun. As you can imagine. I love cheese. To my detriment. Love it.
Anything whose name starts with "Adventure", is a fairground no matter how big, or is "Some-Theme-land".
"Honey pots" - a term used in the tourist trade, planning departments etc to describe intensely tourist-orientated locations full of knick-knack shops, fast-food joints, amusement-arcades, pseudo-old "gastro-pubs", ugly and overbearing blocks of flats, etc.. Honey-pots have generally lost their original character to a manufactured, exaggerated version spiced by an anodyne conformity not much better than the service-areas on the motorways used by most of the visitors. Their advantage is that they concentrate many visitors hence car- and coach-parks and out-of-place developments in a fairly small area, leaving the surroundings quieter for those tourists who actually want to see and respect the region for itself.
Large towns & cities. I visit them only for specific, single events such as an exhibition of interest to me, whose venue happens to be in that town.
Not "place" but style: cruises - even if I could afford it, which I can't anyway. The port near my home now hosts regular cruise-ships and if ships were ever meant to be elegant as well as functional... the largest fail the elegance utterly. There are smaller, well-proportioned cruise-ships about, but the biggest ocean-going ones look like bulk carriers planed down to main deck and fitted with the biggest and most ostentatious block of flats the builders could find that might fit. Interesting to consider how much longer these huge diesel-powered vessels that fulfil mere want not need - and indeed tourism generally - might continue with the increasing pressure everywhere to reduce using petroleum-based fuels.
I live in a seaside resort so my holidays have almost all been to inland places, too; and usually where there is a tourist trade but not overwhelmed bit. Such regions' tourism is typically based on the region's natural geography, not sun-sea-Sangria-&-sex; and seem to attract many more "home-grown" than foreign tourists.
WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH 