Moonshine Ink The love/hate relationship with tourism The spray-painted message was loud and clear: Tourist Go Home! I could feel the hate, the anger, the disgust that oozed out of the hand that scrawled the words along the roadside — but I also understood where the author was coming from. After all, anti-tourist sentiment often is broadcast loud and clear throughout the Truckee/Tahoe region. Except, this wasn’t in Tahoe; it was on the Big Island of Hawaii. My husband’s 95-year-old grandmother lives in Kailua-Kona. Given her age, she will no longer fly, so as pandemic travel restrictions to Hawaii began to ease, we felt comfortable saying yes when she wanted us to come visit. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a bit of hesitation. We weren’t too keen on visitors inundating Tahoe during the supposed stay-at-home order, increasing our exposure to Covid and threatening the exhaustion of our resources. But somehow this seemed different. If we wanted to avoid quarantine, we had to have a negative Covid test prior to and after arrival. I’d have felt much more at ease last summer knowing that everyone descending upon Tahoe had taken a test. But that would be impossible to enforce with people free to drive about the state without roadblocks. Hawaii, however, is surrounded by ocean and can only be accessed by air or boat travel. Thus, it was easy to cut off tourism — but at what cost?