Popular places you have no desire to visit

Hard to do when you're driving 90 mph just to keep up with traffic and the road suddenly branches with little signage or warning, to a route you weren't expecting, and you're instantly sent on a transporter to hell.
If you live there, I'm sure you figure it out fairly quickly. If you're a tourist, not so much. One trip down there we ended up taking the wrong exit and cruised the neighborhood near the Dolphins' stadium for a bit. That was fun.

 

Easiest big metros areas in which to get lost is an interesting question. I'd put Miami up there, and Seattle, and Houston's no slouch. But I think Long Island is number two and with all provincial pride, I'd say Boston is number one. I have lived there 45 years, and there are large sections of the city proper, let alone the metro area, where I'd be hopelessly lost within minutes without a map or an accurate GPS. And even GPS is often baffled by our quaint custom of having two, three or more different streets in the same town with the same name.

 

Dallas is pretty confusing. Like Miami, there seem to be a ton of different levels of four-lane roads (interstates, state highways, U.S. highways, county roads, the WTFly named FM roads) that can easily befuddle visitors. Some of them run parallel to each other, some have tolls and others don't, some just go in a giant loop. There are four or five different interstates and another half-dozen U.S. highways all converging from different points of the compass and miles upon miles of sprawl and suburbs that all look the same.

 

I was driving in Dallas probably 10 years ago and accidentally got into a toll lane. About a year later I got a notice from the rental car company that they had billed my credit card for the violation, It was only a couple bucks, IIRC.

 

Briefly got on I-66 near Dulles earlier this year after missing the 28 south turnoff. We drove about 2 miles to the Fairfax Parkway exit but went through an Easypass toll booth, without the EP. The exact toll was on the rental car bill.

 

Boston was difficult. On a Kings trip, one of the other writers had a car so we drove from Hartford to Boston. We were heading for the hotel and we could see it ahead, but we couldn't get off the damn freeway.

"There's the hotel straight ahead. There's the hotel ahead. There's the hotel. There goes the hotel. We've passed the hotel. The hotel is way behind us."

San Francisco is tough, too, lots of one-way streets. You gotta be careful or you wind up on a bridge going to Oakland.

 

Visited Boston last year. Took a boat from the airport to the hotel. That kind of simplified things.

(Worst driving situation I've dealt with was when I had to spend four days in Newark. Terrible to navigate, I was the only person that could get directions on a phone but I had to drive, and worst of all it was fucking Newark.)

 

I would never go to Disneyland and I live in Southern California and have kids.

San Diego might be the most overrated city in the country.

 

Crazy you’ve never been to California, New York, Boston or Chicago. All great if you know what to avoid.

 

I read the part about the hotel thinking about European Vacation.
"Look kids....theres Big Ben and Parliament."

 

I think this hotel was called the Sonesta. We had stayed at the Copley Plaza on a previous trip.

 

This really makes me want to hear more about Venice. Italy is on my list of go-to places, but I've always thought more of Rome (of course) and Sicily (family connections).