July 9, 2025 Breakfast Meeting Notes
The 50/50 was won by Sharon.
Alicia won the chance to draw in the card game and she found the ace of spades! Congratulations.
Dan opened with a Rotary minute. There will be a new Rotary Peace Center in India. The center will follow on peace building efforts in Asia. Since their inception, Rotary Peace Centers have graduated more than 1800 fellows, promoting peace around the world.
Mike would like to invite members to join the revitalized Public Image Committee. He has sent out an email and had several people volunteer already. He and Jake will try to call a meeting soon so they can get going for the first event, the National Night Out on the first Tuesday in August in Thornton.
Denise passed around a signup sheet to revitalize the service project committee. Denise keeps the calendar and we are trying to keep up one service project per month. Please sign up if interested and let her know what times are good for you. One of the things to consider is how to do a weather-dependent service project.
Denise also mentioned that our new District Governor, Luc Pomerleau, will be coming to Plymouth on Wednesday the 20th of August. She is looking for 3 or 4 members to meet him and have dinner with him at the Common Man Inn the night before. They would also like some members to go with him to Yamas for dinner on Wednesday night, as Luc just got back from Greece and is a lover of cheese and wine. She would also like to have us give a small gift to Luc that isn’t maple syrup. She suggested making a small donation to Polio Plus or the Rotary Foundation in his honor.
Raisa had held 5 spaces for the Hubbard Brook dinner tonight. Denise and Sharon will attend but there may be room for 2 or 3 more Rotarians. (Dinner is free, and there will be a story hour.)
Steve announced that there will be a ukulele concert at 7 pm tonight at Bristol Community Church to benefit the Common Man for Ukraine.
Marybeth introduced our speaker, Sara Clemence. She is mom to Lia and Jack and a very good friend of Marybeth’s. Sara is an author, an editor, and a writer who has written for many national publications. Most recently she was the travel editor at the Wall Street Journal and is news director at Travel and Leisure. She recently wrote a piece entitled “The Last Place on Earth that Any Tourist Should Go” that appeared in the Atlantic. Her talk today is about how to travel without contributing to over tourism.
The Internet helps us to connect to people very close to us and very far away. But we are not making connections between these extremes, with people in the local networks that are so important to us as a society. She asked us how we use our phones when we travel and how they have affected our travel. The responses indicate that we use them to search out basic information and do essential things like booking rooms, but the unintended consequence is that we are steered to the same five-star attractions and destinations. As a result, while phones have made travel easier, they have not always made it better. Over-reliance on phone algorithms have contributed to overtourism, so that local people feel overwhelmed and no longer want tourists to come.
In 1950, the World Tourism Institute reports that there were 25million international tourist arrivals. In 2019 there were 14 billion. Places like Venice, Barcelona, Paris, and even our national parks, are getting overwhelmed and getting loved to death. For example, a couple of years ago Sara went to the Mare neighborhood in Paris. When she had been there 15 years earlier, it was charming, but now it is shoulder to shoulder full of tourists. She noted that here had been a rivalry between felafel restaurants, but now everyone wants to go to the one that the algorithms decided was “best” and as a result, there is now a long line for that one place. She also noted that Monet’s gardens a Giverny are packed with tourists, but there is a lovely impressionist museum in the same town that is not crowded at all.
Sarah suggests that we should go to see the places that aren’t popular, using our phones for basic travel necessities, but trying to find new things to see and do that aren’t already over-exploited. We are losing serendipity and discovery by relying too heavily on our phones. Avoid the lines and go for a new experience. She suggested asking the servers at the restaurant where you’re eating where THEY go to eat. This way you can avoid going to the same places that everyone else is visiting.
She noted that overtourism also contributes to tourists moving to the place they love and causing congestion and inflation. Portugal and Bali are unfortunate examples of this trend.
Happy dollars were shared by Tony, Denise, Phil, Marybeth, and Steve.
Respectfully submitted,
Lora Miller, secretary