All Good Things Flow into the City, Where We Ignore Them

I just got back from Cape Cod after my first visit there in almost a decade of making my home in Massachusetts. After this vacation, I only have two unforgivable oversights on the Boston Bucket List: I have yet to catch a game at Fenway, and I have never visited Salem (which I've been told is way less kitschy than I imagined, since I basically thought Salem was a 24/7/365 city-wide version of Sleep No More but for the The Crucible).

When I was a kid and with my parents often dragging me to any number of Great Lakes tourist traps—each one of which had an inexplicably large number of fudge shops—I developed a skepticism of anything that seemed like it was for tourists. I became the sort of person who resisted going to a museum because I was a world-weary cynic, convinced that Monet and Seurat were just bait to lure suckers into a gift shop where their masterpieces were sold on mugs and T-shirts. National parks and wildlife preserves? A trick to make you pay for the privilege of looking at slightly different trees than the ones at home.

I was dumb, but at least my thoroughly self-defeating snobbery preserved a lot of surprise pleasures for later in life. I realized that other day that I had never, in my life, spent an entire day watching a beach disappear under a rising tide.

One of the best days of my life was spent in Detroit, where one of the most civic-minded Uber drivers I've ever encountered decided to spend a morning and early afternoon taking me to different museums and sites around his city, while lecturing me on the city's history and the follies of the Chicago Bulls' front office management (for the record, time has proven Floyd pretty much correct on all counts).

So here I am, fully converted to the cause of the Local Landmark and Unskippable Tourist Site. But I'm still kicking myself that I've left so much undone everywhere I've lived. I lived in northern Wisconsin for almost a decade and never saw a Packers game at Lambeau Field. I lived two blocks from the La Brea Tar Pits in LA and never visited (though I was a regular at the art museum next door). I think the last time I was at the Art Institute of Chicago was for an elementary school field trip.

What's you most inexcusable civic oversight? What amazing and beautiful thing did you completely ignore while you had easy access to it? More optimistically, what was your most pleasant surprise when you finally did force yourself to do the "tourist thing?"

Let me know in today's Open Thread!