I'm not a tour guide, but I play a knight at medieval markets and Renaissance fairs. Last weekend a dude asked one of the other guys in my camp if our cooking fire was real or just a hologram.

Another time a tourist noticed that I'm a girl (it's kind of hard to see under the shitload of armor we normally wear) and asked something along the lines of, "Does the female body react differently when hit with a sword than a male's body?"

Dumb tourists at their best.

I work in a National Park and occasionally lead tours. My park has fossilized redwood trees (34 million years old) and one of them happens to have a pine tree growing out the top of it (20 years old).

Some chick asked me if it was possible that the pine tree growing out the top of the redwood was a descendant of the redwood that had grown from one of its seeds once the conditions were right.

Yes, ma'am, a seed waited 34 million years to grow out of the top of its fossilized parent... Genius.

Instead of saying that, I just said, "No, this is a pine tree."

I used to work at a tourist attraction in Texas and we got some people who had visited the Alamo on their vacation who asked us, "Why did they build the Alamo in the middle of the city?"

Yes, that's right. After taking the Alamo, Santa Anna checked out the shops on the Riverwalk before heading up north to Schlitterbahn to get his tube on.

I'm a tour guide in Chicago, mostly giving architecture tours on the river. We drive up and down the river on a boat and I talk about buildings and history.

I had one guy who thought that all the tall buildings in the downtown area were government projects and they were all mostly empty. Just shells put up to look nice and generate construction. I'm really not sure why...

Also, "Why aren't you talking about Al Capone?" Um, because he didn't design any goddamn buildings.

I work at Valor in the Pacific National Monument, but the USS Arizona Memorial is probably the more well known name for it. We get about 4000-6000 visitors a day, and every single day I am astounded that these people even managed to make it out here.

Just this past weekend a man dropped his shorts to the ground and reached into his underwear with both hands to adjust himself. At the main entrance to the entire park. With children right there. And he honestly just didn't think it was wrong.

We had a family bring a plastic bucket, like the kind of thing you might bring to the beach, with them into the movie theatre. That wasn't a problem; what was a problem was when one of them used it to take a dump while still in the theatre. It's mind-boggling what people think is acceptable at a place of memory. Or frankly any place!

NYC helicopter pilot here.

"Where are the twin towers now?"

Whilst flying over Coney Island in Brookyln, NY: "Is that where the Jersey Shore was filmed?"

My favorite was when it started to rain and you can hear the sound of rain hit the windshield and SEE THE WATER DROPLETS and the front seat passenger points, and asks, "Is it raining?"

Used to work at a zoo. Another coworker and I caught some people who were beyond old enough to know better off the path, down a hill, through bushes, getting close to the elephants. We shouted at them to get back up to the road, that they can't go into the elephant area. Their excuse was there wasn't a sign to tell them not to.

We should have just let them go Darwin-style...

I volunteer at a museum. One time, a woman, surrounded by Civil War artifacts, asked: "Is this stuff from World War II?"

"No," I said, "The Civil War."

She perked up and replied, "Oh! So do you anything from Martin Luther King?"

Oh my god... I used to work at the Navy pier in Chicago. So many instances of unbridled ignorance present themselves daily. Here's a couple examples I can think of a few years down the line:

1. Tourists screaming about how they can't see the whales or dolphins... in Lake Michigan.
2. People FROM CHICAGO asking where the ocean is. It's a lake and it's 20 feet behind where we are standing. Oh, and it's massive. I literally don't know how you could miss this.
3. Are the boats upstairs? Ok, no. Sea level.

I watched a tourist throw his hat over the railings at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington cemetery...then proceed to go and pick it up.

I work at a drive through zoo. I drive a horse-drawn wagon and while I was explaining the difference between an ostrich egg and an emu egg to some guests, a 40-year-old woman asked me how big a zebra's egg was. So I had to explain how mammals give birth to a grown woman with 3 kids.

"Does water go all the way around the island?" I used to be a tour guide in Hawaii.

Used to live and work in a national park. One lady was very upset that the animals weren't groomed. She got quite irate over it. She thought we should take more pride in their appearance. I was dumbfounded.

When I was working as a tour guide we used to tell silly jokes for the kids. One of the local tree species has bark that looks a bit like bacon, so we would tell people that on a warm summers day if you stand really close and sniff the trees it smells like cooking bacon. An American (because it is always an American) took us seriously, smelt one and then got surprisingly angry at us when the tree did not in fact smell like bacon.

I work at one of the largest Pleistocene paleontological sites in North America. I've had people ask where they can see the living mammoths.

Columbian Mammoths went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago. No, they're not alive, no they're not dinosaurs, no you can't have your money back just because you're a moron. Go home.

I was a tour guide in Edinburgh. Ghost tours, for the most part. I'd take people into the Vaults and the graveyards and creepy built-over streets.

The stupidest tourists I ever encountered were a family of four who turned up on a very slow day in mid-winter. Pro tip, if you want to do a ghost tour and get scared out of your mind, don't do it at lunchtime. That's what night time is for (partly for atmosphere, but really because nobody does jump-scares in the afternoon). But these muppets showed up at 1pm. They were the only people on the tour, and I was trying my best to make it entertaining and creepy for them.

Alas, my best was not good enough. They didn't want spooky stories, they wanted actual ghosts and nothing else would do. And when I failed to provide actual ghosts, they threw a collective tantrum and took me hostage. They cornered me and told me I wasn't getting out until they saw some poltergeist activity. The dad started threatening me (I was a petite, female, about 19 at the time) with physical violence.

Sucks to be him -- I have a trained voice and I am loud when I want to be, so I started screaming for help (no mobile phones back then) and fending him off with the stick I always carried on tours. The guys from the tour company's office heard me and came to help, along with the boss' massive dog. The family got kicked out, no refund, and banned. They're lucky I didn't call the police.

That was the most dramatic stupidity I dealt with. Mostly it was just people asking where Edinburgh Castle is stored in winter or whether we have electricity in Scotland.

I used to work in a National Park visitor's center. One day, out of nowhere, there was this huge commotion and a lot of screaming from the lobby.

I walked over to find an entire tourist family crying and screaming and other staff trying their best to manage the situation. Then the air shifted and the smell hits me.

They had applied a liberal amount of BEAR SPRAY all over themselves and the entire lobby. Apparently, they had mistaken the wording of "bear repellent" and had assumed it was to be used like mosquito repellent.

I used to guide whitewater rafting trips on the Kennebec river in Maine. One time, we got a group of twenty-somethings who had been wandering astray of the greater Orlando area for the first time in their lives. I took them on an 8-hour trip down one of the most remote and scenic areas in Maine (a town of thirty five about an hour from the nearest 'big' town of about 15,000) and after traversing a dangerous thirteen miles of river, these people who had only known theme parks their whole lives said to me, "Wow, you guys worked really hard to do all this. The trees look so real!"