What tourist traps have you visited?

How about also listing foreign tourist traps you've visited?

San Fracisco pier 39 july 5th.Oh....my...God. talk about claustrophobia

Eiffel tower elevators

The Madonna Inn (we stayed there), Disney World (never again), South of the Border (OK, we were headed to Florida, but for years always drove on by) Wall Drug (besides the Badlands and Mt Rushmore, what else is there to do in South Dakota unless you're fucking the governor), and the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, NC which in a little over a month will be home to AvaFest, the final event marking her one hundreth birthday.

Juliet's Balcony in Verona. Not my choice to go there.

Guy Lombardo Museum in London, Ontario.

Las Vegas strip

Graceland

Plymouth Rock. It's just a small stupid rock with a fence around it!

Liberty Bell

I'm listing these with no derision whatsoever, but with knowledge that while some of these are amazing and beautiful and stunning, they are *still* tourist traps:

London Tower Bridge, West End, Chunnel from London to Paris, the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Siena, Times Square, Niagara Falls, CN Tower, Disney World, Universal Studios Orlando, Colonial Williamsburg, Busch Gardens, Cirque du Soleil (multiple times in multiple locations), Bourbon Street, Graceland, largest McDonalds in the world (spans the interstate highway/Will Rogers Turnpike in Oklahoma), Carlsbad Caverns, Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, Algonquin Provincial Park, Corning Museum, Mammoth Mountain, Lake Tahoe, Golden Gate Bridge, Sausalito, (all the associated tourist traps in SF - I lived there for a few years), Pike Place Market, Forks(!!), San Juan Islands, Honolulu, Diamond Head Kauai, Waimea Canyon, Hilo, Yosemite National Park, Sea World, San Diego Zoo, Wild Animal Park (now called something else), Sequoia and Redwood National Parks, Catalina, Downtown San Diego, Miramar Naval Air Station, Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, Greek Theater/Hollywood Bowl in LA, Walk of Fame, Hollywood, Las Vegas Strip, the Mystery Spot, Universal Studios Hollywood, Plimouth Plantation, Faneuil Hall, Fenway Park, Boston Common, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anchorage, AK, Tijuana, Continental Divide/New Mexico.

Those are the ones I can remember right now. It's kind of a good exercise for me to realize even though I haven't traveled in awhile, I have done a lot.

Wisconsin Dells and Branson

R12 I was just about to post the Dells. OMG. It beggars belief that it's a destination of any kind, other than a place to end your life.

[quote]South of the Border (OK, we were headed to Florida, but for years always drove on by)

Did you at least get a complimentary welcome blowjob from one of their two US Senators?

Wisconsin Dells = Myrtle Beach = Branson = Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge

Watching the sun go down in Oia. There are much better sunset spots on Santorini (which you don't have to share with thousands of other annoying people).

Space Needle in Seattle, Niagara Falls, Gatlinburg, Frankenmuth and Mackinac Island. Sears Tower in Chicago. Now it’s called some thing else.

I was guilted into driving my ageing neighbor to Noah's Ark. Looneyville.

Graceland.

You enter the Ark Encounter through a rainbow. Wonder how many "Christians" complained that it was gay, not remembering the significance of the rainbow to the salvation of mankind ( according to them).

To add to r12 and r15, if you’ve ever been to Orlando, but not Wisconsin Dells, you’ve been to both.

Orlando is WD on steroids.

The Desert of Maine

I go out of my way to visit cheesy tourist traps.

[quote]I go out of my way to visit cheesy tourist traps.

So, you must have visited Grandpa's Cheese Barn.

As an Australian, I know most of those Boston/Cambridge locales from Fallout 4.

Rockefeller Center observation deck. Before going up you have to wait in line to have your picture taken in front of a backdrop of construction workers sitting on a beam. You have to wait even if you don't want a picture. I tried to skip over the line but they yelled at me. I also got yelled at in Moma because I walked underneath the African American flag that was hanging from the ceiling. It was just the right height where I couldn't see it but it brushed against my hair. They should've put some velvet rope in that spot.

To me, the worst of all was Fisherman’s Wharf. I didn’t know anything about but a friend wanted to fo. Incredibly horrible and tacky.

R11, I don’t find the Louvre, the Met, the whole city of Siena, even the Eiffel Tower, tourist traps. Even if these places attract lots of tourists ,they do so deservedly.

My partner and I love Times Square. We always stay very close to it so we can get Krispy Kreme as a late night snack. It's always packed, but moves fast.

Also enjoy the Lincoln Memorial when we visit DC.

Gatlinburg was mentioned above. It's a reich wing shithole. Lots of life size Trump cut-outs to proudly take one's picture with. Blech.

We also love Fisherman's wharf in SF, as well as riding the cable cars. It's a hellish minimum 2 hour wait in line, but completely worth it.

Tokyo Skytree. Just me and hundreds of Chinese tourists with no concept of personal space queuing for over an hour. Plus I am claustrophobic and have vertigo so it was an orgy of self torture.

Slausen's Lost Oasis

My father took us to Gatlinburg when I was a kid. As an adult, I have visited the House on the Rock.

[quote]I don’t find the Louvre, the Met, the whole city of Siena, even the Eiffel Tower, tourist traps. Even if these places attract lots of tourists ,they do so deservedly.

Exactly, R27. There's a clear line between highly popular and a kitschy tourist trap that conveys no sense of the place beyond a place to park tour buses and an McDonalds next to the M&Ms store.

If you go to Florence mid-summer and find the core streets impassable with foreign tourists from 11am to 8pm, that's unfortunate, but it doesn't refute the brilliance and beauty of the city. The Louvre is not a crap experience because 99% of the visitors are there to see one painting.

It's funny to me how people who have barely been off the farm will dismiss any city with tourists as a trap, inauthentic, a fraud even. Others insist on bypassing Paris for Český Krumlov, for a "real" experience of another, entirely different place similar only in that both have a great many tourists relative their population figures.

When almost everyone is either an influencer or wants to appear informed and slightly jaded, travel advice gets a little ridiculous.

Times Square, Empire State Building, The Strip in Las Vegas, Disney World, Bourbon Street, Sunset Strip. Is the Albuquerque Balloon Festival a tourist trap? Same with Washington DC.

Also did spread break in Panama City Beach in college.

*spring

Another for Gatlinburg TN. We went to the 1981 Worlds Fair. The memories are all so vivid in my mind. There was a huge Haunted House in Gatlinburg. I was eight. My mom bought us tickets. It was cool as fuck, but as soon as I noticed Frankenstein was behind me, I ran out the fire exit. That was that.

Growing up in Missouri, I've done Branson many times. Silver Dollar City is the hillbilly theme park there. I used to be obsessed.

The Petrified Forest in Calistoga, CA.

Several Madame Toussauds museums and Ripley's Believe It Or Nots. My favorite Ripley's is in Newport, OR next to the low rent wax museum that is not anywhere near the quality of a Madame Toussauds. It is a hilarious experience.

The Sherlock Holmes house museum at 221b Baker Street in London. I LOVE THIS PLACE! Highly recommend!

The Houdini Museum on 35th Street in NYC

That crazy outsider art complex Art Queen in downtown Joshua Tree run by Mary Tree, with an alien spaceship and covered it in bits of mirrored glass and you can crawl up inside it and hang out. And who could forget the "World Famous Crochet Museum?"

I've been to a million sculpture gardens. The one in Oslo is a legitamate outdoor museum but it's whacky and incredible. I love the outsider art ones, where some guy spent decades builting structures out of junk. There's one in Goshen, Ma called the Three Sisters Sanctuary. It's unreal. The other one that is mindblowing is the Garden of Eden in Lucas, KS.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles is one of my all-time favorite attractions. The shows are so wonderful, they take me back to childhood. The puppets all look like they were pulled out of a mass grave and pressed back into action after years of puppet slumber, but that's part of the charm!

Story Land in Glen, NH is an amazing vintage theme park where the trees begin to sing to you when the park closes for the day. Incredible.

Mike's Maze in Sunderland, MA for America's grandest cornfield maze, a petting zoo, a camera obscura, potato rifles and kettle corn.

Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge MA during Halloween season for hot cider around a bon fire at the village green, surrounded by a restored 1700s village, while people in pilgrim clothes tell ghost stories.

Salem, Ma during October is also something one must experience at some point in their life. It really pops off. I love the trolly tour Rebecca Nurse's homestead, the Salem Witch Cottage Theater, all the tarot readers and crystal shops, the Tituba house, all of it.

The Paul Bunyan statue at Trees of Mystery in Klamath Falls, Oregon

Those huge plaster dinosaurs from Pee Wee's Big Adventure

Shakespeare's House in Stratford-Upon-Avon

Two Sleepy Hollow Cemeteries. The one in Concord that is the resting place of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathanial Hawthorne, Luisa May Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. And then the other one in Tarrytown NY which is the resting place of Washington Irving.

Walden Pond. You can walk a path and you will come to a small cabin that is a replica of Henry David Thoreau's cabin

But the biggest, baddast, coolest, most awesomest tourist attraction I ever visited was Portmeirion, Wales, home of The Village from the wonderful, kitchy Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner. I stayed for three nights. Once the day visitors leave at 5 pm, the Village is yours to explore at length in relative silence. And one of the channels on the TV in your room is 24/7 Prisoner episodes. I was in HEAVEN!

Anyplace where you go up stairs or an elevator to see some supposed magnificent view. Most of the views are not that impressive or interesting. The gift shops even less so.

Rock City.

Every Hard Rock Cafe or TGIFridays I've ever had to eat at because they were convenient/open late in the city I was visiting. Every Dave and Busters I've ever taken godkids or nephews to to kill time and be the "fun" relative.

The St. Louis Arch. Now THAT is a claustrophobic elevator.

CERN in Geneva Switzerland

Have done the usual: Hollywood (for the pure kitsch), Times Square (at its seediest c. 1980), Fisherman's Wharf (left almost immediately), French Quarter (fun despite being a tourist trap), The Strip in Vegas (depressing), Gatlinburg (only to drive through which was enough), Niagara Falls (Asian friends had to see it, at least the US side isn't as tourist trappy as the Canadian).

The monuments in DC are hardly tourist traps, although the nearby food trucks are. The Louvre is only trappy around the Mona Lisa and the place is empty and more interesting at night.

Jesus Christ some of you people have no concept about what a tourist trap is.

The Duomo of Florence is not a tourist trap. The Empire State Building is not a tourist trap. Disney World is not a tourist trap.

A tourist trap is defined by its pointlessness, genericness, lack of authenticity and poor quality often at high prices. Typically they take the form of an inner city “festival marketplace.” Basically, any place that has a Bubba Gump Shrimp.

Top tourist traps in the US:

New York - Times Square, South Street Seaport

Boston - Faneuil Hall Marketplace

Chicago - Navy Pier

Los Angeles - most of Hollywood Blvd. in Hollywood, Universal CityWalk and Santa Monica Pier

San Francisco - Pier 39

Miami - Bayfront Marketplace

Orlando - Disney Springs and Universal CityWalk

The Corn Palace.

R43 Was just at the Navy Pier a few weeks ago in Chicago. My travel mates insisted on checking it out. My god what a snooze fest. There's nothing there except a Ferris Wheel and food. But the walk to get there from the Art Institute was invigorating.

That's a narrow view, r43. I'd say any place with a gift/souvenir shop is a tourist trap.

[quote]That's a narrow view, [R43]. I'd say any place with a gift/souvenir shop is a tourist trap.

All museums, then, r46?

Wisconsin Dells is a complete mess, but the sex with the latino lifeguards can be off the charts.

DataLounge.

Sure, r47.

There's some town in Wisconsin, IIRC, which has troll statues all over. It also has a mustard museum, which I visited and bought some special mustard at. I was on a road trip at the time.

The Southernmost Point in the Continental US, which you can look at from afar any time you’d like.

R4 it would be much shorter if you just list the tacky places you HAVEN'T been.

Branson

Paris

Meramec Caverns

Ruby Falls. Somewhere in Kentucky when I was 9. You go down into a cavern that has a waterfall. They are ruby colored because they focus red lights on them. Nothing is “ruby” about it. I begged my dad to stop after seeing the billboards for 80 miles leading up to it.

Tower of London, Big Ben, The Colosseum, Vatican City, Trevi Fountain, Eiffel Tower, The Louvre.

Few were really worth it.

lol, r55.

Your cute story reminds of my Mom being a little girl and wanting to see a "fan dance" -a dancer wearing a beautiful gown and twirling large boa fans.

So she steps up to the little eye telescopes, puts her penny in, and sees a black and white film reel of an Asian fan jumping around.

The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, Calif. Weird place.

Really, R56. St. Peter's Basilica was a waste of time? Perhaps you'd prefer the Wall Drug store in South Dakota.

Maybe the people who run the Vatican Museums and the Louvre want to make as much money as possible and let in huge crowds that make the experience unpleasant but that doesn't mean these museums don't have excellent collections.