Fifty Tour Guides, Red Wine, and a White Carpet…

Last night we had fifty tour guides in our living room. With a white carpet, we’ve learned to have a bottle of “Wine Away” handy. (Over twenty years of this annual bash, our guides have spilled — it seems — gallons of red wine on our carpet. Everyone has a folk remedy. For years, we’d pile salt on the spill and post a chair over it so dancers wouldn’t grind in the stain.)

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As we do each year, we flew our guides in to Seattle for an annual summit. (In 2007, thirty years after I led our first tour, our guides led 12,000 people on 450 tours.) We were celebrating the end of a week-long series of itinerary brainstorming sessions and radio interviews.

Smart guides with foreign accents are great on radio, so I make sure to take full advantage of their presence in Seattle for our radio-production needs. Most of the people I interview for my weekly radio hour are either tour guides or guidebook writers. After 12 hours of interviews with our visiting guides this week, I was reminded that guides and writers may know their countries equally well, but tour guides — being expected to entertain as they travel — are generally much better talkers than the writers (who work alone).

It’s a thrill to open our house up to the guides (after all, they gave us the financial wherewithal to buy it) and just have a rip-roaring party. It’s my favorite social event of the year. Conversation was at a roar as guides were trading stories and catching up.

A few of the old guard was there — us old-timers from the days before cell phones, when buses had no air-con or CD players, and each of our groups got a “cash pack” (with starter bills in each of the many currencies we’d encounter, back before the simplicity of a European-wide euro currency).

I gave a talk earlier in the day to the guides about the importance of us all (past and present) learning from each other. They do this during their apprentice period and via staff assistants who may not aspire to be lead guides, but assist on tours and know the “Rick Steves” drill well. I used the metaphor parents use on their teenagers — “if you sleep with someone, you sleep with everyone they’ve ever slept with” — to illustrate the notion that “if you guide with someone, you guide with everyone they’ve ever guided with.” Then I refined my point by explaining how my piano teacher used to brag that my “piano teacher lineage” went back to Franz Liszt — so I was, indirectly, a student of Liszt.

As I surveyed the crowd of guides (including our crop of hotshot new guides), I felt satisfied that my guiding passions were picked up indirectly by each guide in the noisy room.

Marita from Sweden is talking of the fun she had taking her group into Stockholm’s ice bar (where everything, even the mugs, are made of ice). Marijan is talking with our daughter Jackie comparing gender issues in Morocco and Slovenia. Tommaso from Sicily reminds me how popular our Sicily tours are, and nags me to write a book on the island. Colleen advocates an overnight in Monemvasia rather than Gythio in Greece’s Peloponnesian Peninsula. Etelka is thrilled that we plan to publish a guidebook to Budapest and Hungary that will complement the tours she leads through her homeland. Martin reminds me Shakespeare’s first language was Welsh. Saso is excited to include Mostar and a bit of Bosnia-Herzegovina in our Adriatic tours next year. Lale is primed and ready to host me and our film crew in April as we film a new TV show on Istanbul. I explain to Rainier that my son Andy beat his record for the speed-walk across the width of the five Cinque Terre towns, and he’s welcome to dethrone Andy…but it’ll be tough.

The only controversy of the week-long summit is my insistence that we keep guide names on the tour member feedback on our website. (Some guides feel an unnecessary pressure to dish up all the group wow-ing extras that others do, and are afraid customers will expect one guide to do the others’ tricks.) I am so proud of our guides’ performances, that I want the public to read all the surveys from last year’s tour members…unvarnished and with names.

Apart from a globe, there’s only a Turkish carpet in our living room to hint that I may have traveled. We roll up our Turkish carpet when it’s time to crank up the music and dance. But first, our guides need to do a little cultural sharing. Margaret (the German guide who loves Wagner) and Federico (the Spaniard who does a mean Tom Jones) perform a dramatic and melo-operatic “Bésame Mucho,” which brings down the house.

Then we crank the music up and dance. The Doors used to be tops…now it’s “Brick House.” After the opera performance by our German and Spanish guides, our Irish guide Stephen McPhilemy whispers in my ear, “The opera was good, but I think it called for a drinking song at the end.”