White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Summer Is Too Important for Politics to Steal

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If you can get your mind off the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, if you can stop checking your 401(K), which seems to have taken off for the dark side of the moon, if you can turn off the cable news channels and do a quick personal inventory, noting that your arms, legs and enough of your mind are still functioning, then you are ready for the balm of summer.

I had always thought that summer culture was epitomized by the French fleeing Paris during August. But the summer migration that renews, whether it is to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or to Botswana, is just as important to Americans.

People need to get away. Staycation is an oxymoron, like airline food.

Americans live for summer and nothing will keep them from the beaches, lakes, mountains and resorts of their bounteous native land. But an increasing number go abroad.

Beware. We might not be as welcome in that great bistro in Montmartre where we often supped, or on the delightful beach in Crete where we once sunned. There are just too many tourists trying to do the same things all over Europe, and more are planning to go.

Americans are part of a new phenomenon, known as overtourism. We were the first mass tourists in the world, but we have since been joined by people of other nationalities, many of whom think they must see Venice, visit the Acropolis, and walk Britain’s Lake District. Not in high summer you won’t, and if you do, you will pay high fees and face various gentle disincentives.

The problem is that more and more people can afford to travel, and they do.

In his 1961 musical “Sail Away,” Noel Coward wrote, “Why do the wrong people travel?” If Coward were alive today, he might write, “Why do so many people travel?”

Curious Germans and inquiring Americans have long since been joined by regiments of Japanese picture-taking tourists. Now the Chinese, too, feel they must gaze upon the Mona Lisa, and the Indians want to see the Highland cattle of Scotland, affectionately referred to as “hairy coos.”

The solution: Go early or go late, if Europe is your destination. There is much to enjoy in what the professionals of the travel industry call the “shoulder season,” which is from about now until late June — and from September to October. Some places like Dubrovnik and Venice are unable to accommodate mass tourism in the summer, and have prevented cruise ships from docking.

About cruising: My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I used to build our vacations around horseback riding, taking our boots and hats with us wherever we went in the world. Then, reluctantly, we took our first cruise. We had misgivings about cruise ships, thinking of them as floating holiday camps. In fact, cruising is a way of taking the hotel with you.

Our first cruise, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was from Greece through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea, and it was magnificent. We went to places we would never have seen if left to ourselves, like Yalta, Odesa, and Constanta, and we had great tours in all of them. We were enchanted from the moment we stepped on board in Athens to our disembarkation in Venice. Also, I was able to visit Istanbul for the first time.

Another memorable cruise was around Cape Horn from Argentina to Chile with plenty of stops in some of the most delightful and unusual towns such as Punta Arenas, Ushuaia and Puerto Montt. To be cruising the treacherous body of water at the bottom of the world, where so many mariners perished, in a luxury liner, is to marvel at technology and your own good luck.

Our most delightful cruise, perhaps, was last year when we took Cunard’s stately Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic from New York to Southampton. This cruise reached levels that were near ecstasy for us.

The crossing entertainment featured conductor Anthony Inglis with members of the UK’s National Symphony Orchestra. Inglis assembled a passenger choir — complete with auditions and rehearsals — which gave two rousing concerts.

In the interests of harmony, I stayed in the audience, but my wife made it into the chorus and was elated that her long-unused gifts as a soprano were still there.

You have to love a man who travels with an orchestra. That, as they say, is class. And to think that we were once snobbish about cruising.

We learned that Inglis will conduct the NSO on the Sept. 5 to 12 QM2 crossing from New York to Southampton. This was music to our ears.

Hey, Travelers, Summer Isn’t the Only Great Time to Visit Europe

A view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon.

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The people of the world are planning to descend on Europe this summer. Not, I hasten to say, as migrants but as tourists.

They will jam the sidewalks of Paris, their buses will be bumper-to-bumper in England’s Lake District, and it will be nigh impossible to get into Venice.

It isn’t that Europe is too small to accommodate the surge of tourists but that a few sights are too popular with tourists from the West and now tourists from China. The history and culture of Europe are a magnet, drawing and delivering for tourists, whether they are first-timers or bucket-listers.

Greece is a jewel in this crown, a place of sparkling wonder of human endeavor and natural formations. The country is ground zero for Western civilization, where visitors can trace the origins of Western arts and sciences, as well as democracy. Visitors can also experience the natural beauty of its coasts, mountains and islands.

I met with the Greek minister of tourism, Olga Kefalogianni, in Athens last month, and we discussed the blessings and challenges of tourism, including the problem of what some call “overtourism.” Not only has Greece attracted tourists for millennia, but it also has a huge capacity to absorb visitors. It would just like to spread them out over the year and the country.

Clearly, Kefalogianni loves her job and was, to an extent, born to it. She is the scion of a very prominent Greek family that owns hotels in Crete, the largest and one of the most inviting of the Greek islands.

The last thing Kefalogianni, who did a stint as a lawyer in New York, wants to do is to discourage tourism. It accounts for 20 percent of Greece’s economy, and the country can absorb untold hundreds of thousands more tourists than it already does.

But there are choke points. And in future planning, the minister told me, she is working to enhance the industry by promoting Greek food, wine and its wide-open spaces for safe outdoor recreation like hiking, climbing and canoeing.

The first thing, she said, is to tell the world how diverse Greece is and how much it has to offer not only in terms of its history but also natural beauty and simple things like walking in its villages.

She wants visitors to spread out and enjoy all of Greece. “Do you know you can ski in Greece?” she asked me. Indeed, the country has 25 ski resorts.

She also said Europe has much to offer year-round besides the summer. In truth, the summer in southern Europe can be extremely hot.

One challenge for the Mediterranean ports is the cruise ships, which are now to be found all over the sea: vast, floating cities with eager sightseers, keen to disembark and spend a few hours in a destination.

They are becoming a challenge for host countries. They dock and disgorge their eager passengers, but they bring problems, from pollution to stressed port infrastructure. Also, the cruisers are ashore so briefly that they spend very little money, considering how many there are: Many prefer to eat all their meals on board, and their principal expenditure is on souvenirs and bus tours.

The cruise ships need more regulation, Kefalogianni said. Recently, I observed the problem firsthand. I — yes, on a cruise — fetched up in Santorini when five other huge ships did likewise. A cable car (or foot or donkey) at the port takes people up and down from Fira, the island’s capital. Well, with thousands in line, the result was chaos. Instead of a visit to a heavenly place, it was a version of hell.

Also, Greece and other European countries’ cities want the ships to base at their ports, provision there, and embark and disembark their passengers there. The beneficial economic effect would be greater that way.

The tourism minister wants visitors to know that Greece (and I would add the rest of tourist-haven Europe) has year-round attractions. She noted that the shoulder seasons of spring and fall offer all the summer attractions with fewer people. On the mainland and on the Greek islands — there are 6,000 of them; 227 are inhabited and 100 have more developed tourism facilities — you can swim early in the year and late as well. In February, I saw people swimming at a beach near Athens. They allowed the water to be cold, but not impossibly cold.

Mediterranean Europe is a place for all seasons. As the British writer Christopher Hitchens told me once, “It’s where it all began.”