The Patriot Travail Guide

Where you shouldn’t spend your summer vacation

By Andrew R Quinio
From the May 2007 Print Edition

Now that you have taken your final exam, and you have handed in your last term paper, it’s time once again to make plans for the summer. School’s out, the weather’s good, and you want to be in any place but Berkeley. But believe it or not, there are places in the world that make Berkeley look like Sesame Street. So before you go rushing off to any part of the world that doesn’t have hippies or tree-huggers, you might want to know about the places that the Patriot thinks you should avoid.

1. St. Louis

Show me a place with the world-famous Gateway Arch, jazz and blues performers, … and the highest concentration of crime in the country. For the typical tourist, St. Louis certainly has a lot to offer, including insecurity. The Morgan Quitno Press, an independent research and publishing company, ranked the Gateway to the West as the No. 1 most dangerous city in the United States in its annual report on the most dangerous and safest U.S. cities. The Morgan Quitno Press uses FBI statistics on murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor-vehicle theft to determine a city’s overall level of safety. If filing police reports isn’t your idea of fun, you might want to head over to Brick Township, New Jersey, the city that is ranked the safest in the nation.

2. Mississippi

Summer is a time to let loose, but that doesn’t necessarily include your wallet. As a starving college student, you are on a tight budget and probably can’t afford luxurious accommodations or expensive souvenirs. So take Mississippi of your list. According to CNN Money, the Magnolia State’s 7 percent state sales tax is the highest in the country. Penny-pinching travelers may want to book a flight to Alaska, the state with no sales tax.

3. Detroit

If you thought Berkeley was ultra-liberal, wait until you land in Michigan’s most populous city. A 2005 study by the nonpartisan Bay Area Center for Voting Research names Motown the most liberal city in the nation. Berkeley was only able to nab third place on the list, due to its lack of a “vibrant and growing political movement,” according to the center’s study.

4. France

Simply mentioning the name of this ungrateful country would probably suffice, but we’ll let the British people explain why France is an awful place to go on holiday. In May 2006, 46 percent of people surveyed by the British travel Web site Where Are You Now said the French were the most unfriendly people in the world. Even if you don’t mind rude people, there probably won’t be a single “cheese-eating surrender monkey” to accommodate you when you arrive. With a 39-hour workweek and 12 national holidays, you may be the one bidding “bon voyage” to your concierge and chauffeur.

5. Copenhagen, Denmark

We all need a break from the hordes of cyclists crowding the Berkeley city streets. If you travel to Copenhagen, your problems will only pedal after you. In 2002, Metropolis magazine declared the Danish capital “one of the world’s great pedestrian cities.” A European road trip to Copenhagen will be out of the question, since all of the parking lots have been converted to public squares, and bicycling is encouraged as the main mode of transportation. Instead, try finding a place where Hummers and Excursions can roam free.

6. Philadelphia International Airport

A special warning about the Philadelphia International Airport: If you need to travel by air, don’t fly out of this airport, which the Bureau of Transportation Statistics ranked last for on-time departures in 2006. Only 71 percent of the flights from Philadelphia departed on time. Bay Area residents especially should avoid this airport, since US Airways flights from Philadelphia to San Francisco were late 100 percent of the time, the BTS reports. It sounds like we are not the only ones who follow “Berkeley time.”

7. Burlington-South Burlington, Vermont

Environmental stewards are commendable, but not when they’re pushy, self-righteous, and overbearing, as most of them are at Cal. So why visit another city whose residents will look down on you for not memorizing the entire script of An Inconvenient Truth? An April 2007 issue of Country Home magazine named Burlington-South Burlington, Vermont, as the best green place in the United States to live. The city got top honors for meeting standards that include miles of mass transit, green power, farmers’ markets, and organic groceries. Just what we need — another city without brand-name retailers.

8. Searchlight, Nevada

It’s the birthplace of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and a destination that families may want to avoid this summer — “13 brothels and no churches” is how Senator Reid succinctly described his hometown, according to an April 2007 article in U.S. News & World Report. If things have changed since little Harry Reid grew up and left town, Searchlight may want to hire a new tourism spokesperson.

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