When our tour guides were in town a couple of weeks ago, they experienced a lot of the NFL playoff hype… and many have become hardcore Seahawks fans. In fact, the 12th Man now has a passport and is showing up in places like Prague, Budapest, Hawaii, Ireland, Madrid, and Paris. Go Hawks!
I just had the joy of hosting an NBC film crew in my living room to talk about marijuana while setting up for this Sunday’s Super Bowl party. Why? To share my ideas on the fact that the two states that legalized the responsible recreational and adult use of marijuana are the same two states with Super Bowl teams.
During the interview, I said, “The people of Washington State and Colorado are wonderful people. You could debate whether we’re smarter, healthier, more outdoorsy, happier, or more free than people from what I call ‘the lower 48.’ But there’s no doubt that the two states that legalized the recreational use of marijuana for adults are the two states with the best football teams in the entire USA. And we’re about to see which of them is number one.”
The interview is scheduled to air this weekend on NBC’s Weekend Today Show. But you don’t need to tune in all weekend to watch it. I’ll post a link to the interview, once it’s available online.
These days, it seems like there are only a handful of speakers who can draw a big crowd at travel shows: Arthur and Pauline Frommer, Patricia Schultz (of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die fame), Samantha Brown, and me. And we’re hired as headliners to help get people to attend travel shows at big cities around the USA. People pay $12 to stoke their travel dreams by browsing through hundreds of booths representing everything from Yosemite to Yap. And they go to the various theaters to hear from travel experts or celebrities. There’s usually folk dancing, cooking demos, zip lines, rock-climbing walls, and Segway trials to boot.
While I could spend many more weekends on the road at these events, I limit my bookings to four a year. I just finished trips to Chicago and San Jose, and I’ll be in Los Angeles and Washington DC in February. Learn more at Adventure Expo.com.
(Photos by Trish Feaster, http://thetravelphile.com/)
It occurred to me that if you’ve just been watching our Facebook coverage for our annual tour guide summit, you’d think all we did was party. Well, the guides have all gone home now, and we’re back at our desks — sorting through all of the great ideas generated by the tour-itinerary roundtables that were the actual work of the summit.
Each day for over a week, all of our conference rooms here were booked with guides from various countries meeting with the appropriate members of our Tour Operations team. They spent long hours debating the fine points of their itineraries and sharing lessons they learned from last year’s experience and experiments. None of our itineraries are broken, but they can all evolve as we grow with our traveling public and fine-tune the structure of what we hope are trips of a lifetime.
In 2013, we took 16,000 travelers on over 600 tours. They came with high expectations (about half of them were alums coming back for second, third, and fourth Rick Steves tours). And, judging from our feedback, we met or exceeded nearly all of those expectations. We break from this huddle energized and enthused…confident that we have the perfect itineraries to match the travel dreams of our tour members.
Thanks to our guides for coming all the way from their homes — most of them in Europe — to Seattle in the dead of winter. Thanks to my amazing staff here at Europe Through the Back Door for designing and hosting this successful summit week. And thanks to all of the travelers who keep us so busy by joining us on our tours. We love this work. And we love traveling with you!
With over a hundred European guides filling my home last weekend, we threw an impromptu multicultural talent show. With this last clip, we’ve bundled a little Hungarian folk dance, our Swedish guides singing a little ditty for downing the local firewater, and our French guides pining for the Champs-Elysées.
Amid all the gaiety, several guides surprised me with their piano-playing skills, and I played a little as well. In the middle of this montage, there’s a quick clip of me at the piano playing “Suite Bergamasque” by Claude Debussy — a reminder that had my Dad not imported German pianos like this one when I was a schoolchild, I would likely never have even gone to Europe… and my life would probably have been much less interesting.
(Thanks to tour guide Trish Feaster for shooting these video clips. For Trish’s blog, see The Travelphile.com.)
If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.