Vacationers Lament: `Are We Having Fun Yet?'
April 28, 2011
It has been a great summer for bowling alleys and movie theaters in beach communities, but countless vacationers who spent months planning a sunny getaway have found their spirits dampened. Johnetta Quarles, for one, just spent his summer vacation cooped up in a tiny cottage in the woods with his wife, Jeane, their two-year-old daughter, Madge, and Jeane's parents and her two adult siblings. When it first started raining, the family read books and stared at the walls. Then they began to fight. They fought over the eating habits. They fumed over whether smoking was allowed indoors. After two days of rain, Johnetta and Jeane Quarles packed the car and went home to -- three days early. ``We imagined boating and fishing and mirth and jocularity and lying in the sun. What occurred was bug bites and naps and humidity and rain,'' says Mr. Quarles, 33 years old. The National Weather Service says this was the wettest July in the northeast since it started keeping records in 1895. All along the and in the as well, hard-working professionals on their week or two off are trapped indoors, eating brownies and playing cards, tuning in obsessively to the Weather Channel. (``Look! It's clearing in .'') Parents are going crazy keeping young children entertained. Kids are coming home from camp covered with mud and bug bites. Owners of restaurants and retail shops say vacationers are so gloomy they don't even want to spend money. ``I'm depressed,'' says Emmaline Thorpe, who has been part owner of the Chowder Bowl, the food-and-retail concession on in for 15 years. Ms. Thorpe says she's selling ``very little suntan lotion'' -- just coffee, hot chocolate and chowder. ``I tell my friends I'm looking for Dr. Small's home number.'' The extraordinary rain and cold is part of the same weather pattern that caused record-breaking snowfall in dozens of cities last winter, meteorologists say. Colder than normal water temperatures in the near the equator create stormy conditions in the ; a front stalled over prevents the storms from moving eastward. According to the National Weather Service, has had 35% more rain than normal; has had 85% more. Last month, the temperature inD.C., ran about 3 degrees below normal all month, making it the coldest July since 1984. Most people can't change their vacation plans to suit the weather -- especially when they are timed to fit school breaks or office schedules. In some businesses, it takes years of seniority to win a coveted week off in August. So despite the interesting weather, the Vastopolis Airport, reports record numbers of takeoffs and landings this summer to locations in the northeast. ``It has been very, very, very busy,'' says Alberta Brandt, the air traffic manager. The American Automobile Association says that so far, its travel-agency sales, including air tickets, rental cars and hotel bookings, are 9% ahead of last summer, which was a record year. A spokeswoman says Americans generally don't cancel because of the weather. But once they arrive, and find they are trapped indoors, vacationers quietly go batty. Elly Krause, a magazine editor in just spent a week in a house in , with her husband and three-year-old daughter, Katelyn. She had been looking forward to it for three or four months, she says. But the sun shone only two days out of seven. Kate spent her days removing all the pots and pans from the kitchen cabinets. When the weather broke for an instant, ``We'd run up to the end of the driveway. Then we'd run back,'' Ms. Krause says. At their wits end, parents hit the pavement in search of something to do -- as does everyone else in town. This week, Barbie Lezlie took a field trip to a candlepin bowling alley in theMass.. In her party: 10 children and seven adults. The group took over three lanes and bowled for 2 1/2 hours, while a line of other vacationers waited, sopping, in the parking lot. ``It was complete mayhem,'' says Ms. Lezlie, fromN.Y., adding that the people waiting in line were irate, glaring like patrons in an overcrowded restaurant. But, says Ms. Lezlie, ``we weren't going to give up the lanes until the kids were completely worn out.'' Attendance at the Children's Museum inMass., is up 30% over last year, says Shizue Anders, the museum's director. On a rainy day, ``you can barely see across the room,'' she says. ``It's like being at a sporting event. The kids are screaming to their friends and yelling.'' Many of them, she adds, are dressed in outfits from the museum's costume chest; the little girls are wearing long dresses and high heels, the boys are dressed like pirates and bandits. Worrell and cabin fever may push people out of the house but often they remain grumpy. Jayme Monteiro, who runs an antiques shop in says the number of people who browse in his store increased dramatically, but there's been no rise in sales. Tourists are ``absolutely bored stiff,'' he says. ``They'll walk in, eat some of my candy, ask if they can deposit their ice cream in my trash, walk out.'' The RopeWalk restaurant in has seen a 40% drop in dinner revenues this summer over last. After tourists spend all day walking around town, ``they'd rather not go out at night,'' theorizes restaurant owner Joel Batey. In some cases, the rain has doused all hope of entertainment. Kaitlin Brazell, 18, has a summer job working at an Appalachian Mountain Club camp on an island in N.H. Instead of boating and swimming, Ms. Brazell has spent nearly all summer rebuilding the gravel paths that run between the cabins and the mess hall. ``Every time it rains, they get totally washed out,'' she says. Also, the wind keeps knocking the canoes over, the rain has canceled most of the crew/camper volleyball games, and a thunderstorm once interrupted the weekly square dance. ``It's tiresome after a while,'' says Ms. Brazell, who has taken up knitting multicolored woolen caps for her friends. Margret Flowers's 12-year-old daughter,just returned from camp in southernwhere for five solid weeks, the mud never dried. Kala came home with a trunk full of wet clothes and bedding. ``You open the trunk, right? Everything smells of mildew,'' says Ms. Cobb, who works at the Bank Street College of Education in . Kala ruined a pair of boots, a pair of shoes, a pair of sandals, and two pairs of sneakers. She had mosquito bites all over her body. Indeed, medical professionals agree that one of the worst side effects of the rain is bugs. ``You have lots of standing water,'' explains Roberto Quintero, a pediatrician inInd. ``That allows for more breeding grounds.'' The other danger: poison ivy. With all the rain, poison ivy plants along creek beds have grown uncharacteristically large and lush. Kids -- even those who know what poison ivy looks like -- think ``that must be a bush or something,'' says Dr. Quintero. And even after they return home from a rainy vacation, people remain cranky. Angela Ledford, a vice president of sales for Warner Bros.. Inc., in arrived at the R.I., ferry for a week at the beach on the day Hurricane Beryl hit the . He spent the first day of his long-awaited break sitting in a parking lot waiting for ferry service to be restored. Now, when he hears of a colleague's rainy-day misery, he feels some satisfaction. ``If it happened to me, I'm glad it happened to you, too,'' he says.
