Monday, 8/1

The results seem to surprise me every year.

Yesterday I finished my annual dorky habit of counting license plates. I've been doing it every year during the week leading up to Art On The Rocks for two decades now, and it's allowed me to realize two things.

One, I really AM a dork for doing it for two decades. And B—gas prices and a weird economy don't seem to have slowed down tourism into Marquette one little bit.

I ended up seeing plates from 41 different states and three Canadian provinces this year, which is down just a little bit (like two or three) from years past. The addition of the Canadians—who haven't been visiting since the Before Times—partially made up for the...strange lack of any visitors (at least that I saw) from most of the New England states. Normally, I see all six, but this year only Connecticut was represented.

Weird.

The other thing I noticed? For the most part, when I saw a plate from a certain state I saw LOTS of plates from that state. In fact, for a couple, like Virginia, Colorado, and Washington, I actually started keeping track of the kinds of vehicles that had the plates, just to make sure I wasn't seeing the same ones over and over.

So if you saw at least 11 vehicles with Colorado plates over the past week, you weren't the only one.

Like I said, none of this really has a bearing on anything, other than, perhaps, that Travel Marquette is doing a darn fine job marketing the area. And that gas prices, for all that people complain about them, don't seem to have an effect on people's driving habits one single bit.

(jim@wmqt.com), dork.