Bad Tourist: Five Thoughtless Things I Saw On Vacation

When I travel, I am a student of human behavior, which is to say I mutter complaints about the things people do that I don’t like. Line cutting is a big one. I hate that.

I recently spent a week on vacation, including a few days (not enough) at Yosemite National Park, where someone apparently behaved so badly that it set something of a record. I didn’t witness it, though. We were off in the park when fellows guests at the Wawona Hotel set off a canister of bear repellent in their room, shutting down the hotel for several hours. These guests, we were told, abandoned most of their gassed belongings and took off.

This gave me the idea of cataloguing the rude things that travelers do in a new feature I shall call Bad Tourist. So here goes the first installment of the five most obnoxious things I actually saw people doing on that trip:

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