Visitors




The city of Tacoma, Pierce County or perhaps the state of Washington should give us a grant.

I guess that’s unlikely, because usually you apply for a grant to get money to do a thing, then you do


that thing. In this case, we’ve already done the thing, so I don’t think any entity is going to mail us a check.

Within our first year of living in Tacoma, we’ve brought in 12 out-of-state visitors. I’m sure there have been tourism department-sponsored campaigns that couldn’t legitimately match our numbers, as I can personally testify that none of these people would have traveled here were it not for us. Two of the 12 were even repeat visits, which demonstrates that we showed them a good time on round one. The total average stay was right around a week.




It’s also true that all of them were blood relatives of Ann, but I don’t have to mention that part in the grant application. You’ve already met the parents and the boys. Our two March trips included Ann’s sister one week, and a pack of her cousins a week later. It was all of her cousins, minus one and his son, but I’ve talked to them and I think they’ll be coming around as well.

While with the parents and the boys we hit the highlights within a 2-hour radius, for the sister and cousins slightly shorter visits were narrowed our focus to Tacoma proper. We never left the city limits of Tacoma with Ann’s sister, and the only time we did with the cousins was a short jaunt just a couple miles across the bay to Vashon Island to see the troll. We also visited one of the other trolls, but that was as they were heading to the airport, so it wasn’t really an extra trip.

With all the visitors, I really feel like we barely scratched the surface. There’s a lot to do in Tacoma.
Even Ann and I haven’t been to any of the historic theaters downtown yet, and we’re taking our exploring rather seriously. We’ll have to correct that. 

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