Beware the ‘dreaded year-end nose pickers’

Harriet Baskas Travel writer

They're out there now, striking fear in the hearts of bus drivers and tour guides. They're pushing slow-moving pedestrians off the sidewalks. And they're forcing museum docents everywhere to interrupt their well-rehearsed presentations to shout “Here we use our inside voices” and “Please! No climbing on the artwork.”

One grizzled guide affectionately, I'm sure, calls them her “dreaded year-end nose pickers.” You may have your own, perhaps unprintable, term for them. But if you're headed to a museum or some other educational attraction this season, you won't be able to avoid them: students on year-end class trips and, soon, clutches of kids on camp trips and on summer vacations with their families.

No more teachers, no more books ...
... No more teachers' dirty looks?  Not quite yet.

The school year is already over in some parts of the country, but many students still have to show up for class for a few more weeks. And as you may remember from your own school adventures, scant learning takes place inside classrooms this time of year.

That's why field trips were invented.

But what happens when a busload of kids on a field trip crosses paths with a bunch of leisure travelers who have just paid $20 admission to tour what they expect will be a quiet museum?

Last week in Toronto, for example, I was pleased to discover that my itinerary crossed paths with a touring exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum about the life and work of Charles Darwin. I looked forward to seeing the famed naturalist's journals, his microscope and some of the original specimens he collected. But I walked into the exhibit hall behind a rowdy school group and couldn't see a darn thing.

What could I do?

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My first thought was to politely work my way past the kids while mumbling something about “age before beauty,” but I was seriously outnumbered and made no headway.

I considered asking for a refund and coming back another time. But I was leaving town that afternoon. I had to stick around.

I did ask the teacher to please get his students to settle down and share the space. That didn't work. In French, I think, he said: “Why do you think I brought them here in the first place?”  Or maybe it was, “It's survival of the fittest! Evolve!”

So I waited. Sure enough, in a few minutes the teacher rounded up his kids and herded them back on the bus. For awhile, I had Darwin's diary doodles and what turned out to be a live giant green iguana all to myself.

Not exactly proof of that survival-of-the-fittest theory, but evidence, perhaps, that sometimes all a well-mannered traveler needs to do is sit tight.

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