A good tour is a great high

Boy, I was buzzing for days after the tour I gave on May 10th. It's dorky to admit you love what you do unless what you do is something super cool like working for the Mythbusters, or something beyond comprehension like being Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But I'm here to tell you my name is Bonnie and I love being a tour  guide. If only there were a support group for me! But I do love it! It's not just a matter of showing off my city, either. A good tour is also a good performance, and that satisfies the actor in me. There is a reason almost every actor in this city works as a tour guide at least once in their lives, if only for a season. Not many of them make a career out of it like me, but they all get licensed and put a few tourist dollars in their pockets.

I'm running these public tours now Thursday-Sunday, which can be booked in advance on Zerve.com. I've got a morning history tour, an evening ghost tour, and I recently created a drinking tour that I am very proud of. I call it "Lightly Sauced- Raise a Glass to History". The title is pretty spiffy too, if I do say so myself. Now, I hate drunk people and I hate pub crawls. Some tour guides have a gift for conducting pub crawls and really enjoy doing them, but I am not that tour guide. "Lightly Sauced" is not a pub crawl. It is a real history tour, just with a little something extra. My idea was to do a really classy drinking tour that doesn't have the goal of getting everybody drunk. Instead of running around with a crowd of noisy inebriates, the group size is limited (all of three of the tours have limited sizes) and the ticket price covers the cost of all the drinks, food, and tips for the wait staff. As I was putting the whole thing together, I came up with the notion of featuring drinks that have some kind of historical connection to Savannah or at least the Old South.

That wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I knew I wanted samples of Madeira wine because Madeira was a big deal here back in the 19th century. The Davenport House Museum does a special presentation every February called Potable Gold: Savannah's Madeira Tradition. Now I kinda wish I'd gone to it. Guess I'll have to wait until next year. Surprisingly, the only restaurant I could find that served Madeira was Jazz'd Tapas Bar. Good thing it's a nice place. And since small plates are what they do, it gave me the genius idea of including a snack everyone on the tour could share. The start time is 4:30 and it runs 3 hours; that's well after lunch and a little before dinner. I didn't want everyone staggering around on an empty stomach! Brian, manager of Jazz'd, was spooky like a horse about working with me. I had to reassure him I wasn't a fly-by-night tour poacher (yes, those exist), bound to screw him over either through malice or incompetence. It takes finesse to work all the numbers so the ticket price covers all the costs while also making some money for me. Then there's the logistics of making sure all the restaurateurs get paid and the servers get tipped. I simplified that by opening up a new credit card expressly for this tour so everyone gets paid as I go.

My next thought was to check out the mead bar at Savannah Bee Company. Mead doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this city's history, so that one's kind of a wild card. I just really like Savannah Bee and their manager (also a local singer), Danielle Hicks, was just so enthusiastic about participating. Plus, how often does anybody get to do a mead tasting?

Mint juleps seemed like the next logical inclusion. Ask anyone to name a Southern cocktail and 99% will say "mint julep" first. So, no connection to Savannah, exactly, but decidedly Southern. And I think Margaret Mitchell says something in Gone With the Wind about Scarlet O'Hara drinking a mint julep, and that book is set in Georgia, so that's close enough for me. I was surprised again to find that almost no one in the Historic District serves mint juleps! Some people have told me it's because they're complex and time-consuming to make, so bar tenders don't like them. Understandable, I guess, but a little disappointing. The bar at the 17Hundred90 Inn and Restaurant was my only option, so I'm lucky it's a nice place and the location fell perfectly in line with where I wanted to go.

Lastly, I knew from the beginning I had to include Chatham Artillery Punch. It's the only drink on the list that was actually invented in Savannah and it's a classic. It's also got, like, 6 different liquors in it, so a good one to end on. Wouldn't want to start off that way, right? There are at least 3 restaurants downtown serving this drink, but 2 of them are on River Street and I didn't want to veer that far off-course. It would also be mean to make people navigate the stairs after loading them up with wine, mead, and a cocktail. By process of elimination, then, the bar at The Pirates' House would have to be my final stop. (As an aside- am I a weirdo for being unduly pleased by the restaurant's bold use the plural-possessive in its name and correct placement of the attendant apostrophe? Is that just me?)

So everything worked out quite nicely! I was able to feature the drinks I wanted and all the stops lined up conveniently from west to east, starting near City Market and ending at The Pirates' House. All I had left to do was run a test to check for bugs.

That's where my May 10th tour came in. Some (delightful, wonderful, very helpful) friends joined me at 4:30 in Telfair Square. I was afraid no one would come because my invitation got basically no response, probably because all my friends are poor and I needed a little money from people to pay for the libations. But John, Brenda, Christa, and Tina came to my rescue! Hooray! We had such a great time and I got some very helpful feedback. Here are some pictures I took along the way. Sorry for the crummy iPhone camera quality:

Raise your glasses, guys! And here's a close-up of the Madeira with Jazz'd's (oh God, too many apostrophes now) delicious Baked Cheese Terra Cotta plate:

The mead at Savannah Bee was much appreciated and I found out it was the first time John and Brenda had ever been in the store. They'd been walking past it for years and just hadn't gotten around to shopping there. It is a shame not to shop at Savannah Bee!

Here is our bartender hard at work crushing the mint for the juleps at the 17Hundred90. He's told me his name on two different occasions and I am ashamed to have forgotten it both times.

I was a little nervous because John is something of a mint julep connoisseur. He makes his own each year for the Kentucky Derby. What would I do if he told me the drink was lousy? I couldn't get it anywhere else, but I wouldn't want tourists to drink crappy liquor. Happily, John informed me the mint julep met his standard. These drinks all have Bonnie's Friends Seal of Approval. That was my other motivation for the test-run: I needed people who regularly drink alcohol to vet the booze for me. I hate the taste of alcohol and I don't drink, so I have no basis for comparison. I overcame my lack of qualification for this tour by delegating the tasting responsibility to my willing guinea pigs.

So, last stop was The Pirates' House and that was a trip! Our bartender was the a woman named Avery, the self-appointed all-mighty Keeper of the Punch. Seriously, she will cut you if you screw with her Chatham Artillery Punch.

Avery likes her job. She likes her job a lot. And by the time John, Brenda, Christa, and Tina got to the bar, they liked her job a lot too. I checked in with the group and they all assured me they were not drunk (isn't that what drunk people always say?), but very pleasantly buzzed. I hung around for a while until I had to get set for a ghost tour and polled everyone for feedback about their experience. The one significant change I made, at my friends' insistence, was increasing the duration from 2 1/2 to 3 hours. I agreed with them it would set a better pace. If you do the tour and you think it's too long, you can blame my buddies. It's their fault. They really lobbied hard for the longer run time.

So if you want to have as much fun as John, Brenda, Christa, and Tina while staying mostly (or moderately) sober and learning some stuff about Savannah, or if you want to impress your friends and family by scheduling a really special experience for them, come with me and get "lightly sauced"!

A Slow Ride for Slow Times

Well, 2012 was a dismal year and 2013 isn't shaping up to be any better so far. I simply cannot figure out what changed between December 2011 and January 2012 that would cause my business to collapse like the sunny side of an iceberg. The decline is especially galling in light of the fact that Visit Savannah keeps insisting tourism was up this year. It makes me wonder what their definition of "up" is. Or maybe they don't actually know what "tourism" means. My understanding is the only numbers they really have to work with are the hotel occupancy rates. More people coming to Savannah should mean more people doing tours and shopping and stuff, but that does not appear to be the case. I've heard from numerous other walking tour owners (with a few irritating exceptions) and other business owners that 2012 was a bad year. I don't know what conclusion to draw from this disparate data. How can tourism be up and down at the same time? It did occur to me that Savannah's participation in the Rock 'n Roll Marathon the last couple of years might be skewing the numbers. It brings 20,000 people to the city all at once, but they're here to run, not play. Most of them only stay overnight or for a day, then they're gone. So, there's that. Maybe the type of tourists that came to Savannah was different this year. Visit Savannah has the specifically stated goal of attracting high-caliber travelers, but perhaps their aim is off. They may have flung their nets wide and only drug in the beer-guzzling boors who stay overnight to party a bit, do a ghost tour, and leave the next afternoon. I don't know. I just don't know what happened. Desperate times call for desperate measures, though. Another tour guide acquaintance of mine let slip at the Crystal Beer Parlor one night that the Savannah Slow Ride was in desperate need of certified tour guides. I contacted one of the owners through Facebook to offer my services and Samantha was glad to accept my resume. I've ridden along on one of their daytime tours (conducted by my friend Lawrence) and one of their ghost tours (led by one of my other friends, Louis) to get the hang of things. Samantha still hasn't given me any paid work to do yet, which I hate because I need money and I needed it yesterday. Thing is, February is still the slow season even for a business that is doing better than mine. The timing is just awful. I have so many bills that come due in January and February and those are the months when I have the least money, even in a good year. I have to renew my business license, pay my car insurance, pay for my vehicle registration, pay for my website, and so on and so forth. Samantha told me they have a lot of tours on the books next weekend, but I won't be available for any nighttime work because I have a show to do at the Bay Street Theatre on the 15, 16, and 17, which I had already committed to before I ever contacted the Slow Ride. Why is all of the timing always bad?! Damn you, February! You will always be a 28-day, twisted dwarf of a month who drags his clubfoot across the calendar and makes everyone else uncomfortable! I hate you.

If  I can claw my way through the month, though, the money should be pretty good once the season hits high gear in the Spring. The Slow Ride is only entering its second year in business, but it has become very popular. The story I heard was that Samantha got the idea when she was in Milwaukee (beer, anyone?) and saw this giant bicycle thing being pedaled by all these people who were having a great time and drinking beer as they went. She got all fired up and her husband built what's called a quadricycle and they started this company. The quadricycle is like a giant table on wheels with a cover over it. There are seats along each side and the riders pedal to make the thing go. A driver at the front is in charge of steering and braking. This rattly contraption is designed to only go about 4mph at most, which I think is all wrong. The carriage horses pee on the street corners at a higher velocity. I would take off the controls so the speed of the Slow Ride was directly proportional to the number and speed of the pedalers. Then I would rename it the Savannah Thrill Ride, skip the Historic District entirely, and send the group flying down Highway 80 to the beach. Yeah.

Speed or no speed, beach or no beach, both groups I rode along with earlier this month had a really great time. I am entirely mystified, frankly. I mean, I can't figure out what makes the Slow Ride so much fun for people. As a tour, it's very, very history-lite and ghost story-lite. There's a lot of chit-chat and joking amongst the group, as well as plenty of drinks for the excursion. The tours take two hours, the guests make a few stops and get off the quadricycle at a couple of places to snack and refill their drinks. It strikes me as primarily self-generated fun. The people I rode with were already in a good mood before it began. Only the glummest of tour guides could have ruined their good time and I don't know that the chipperest of tour guides could perk up a group that was in a funk from the get-go. More than being informative, it is the guide's primary to responsibility to keep the laughs coming. It all looks deceptively easy, but there's a hidden aspect to the job: making sure the guests have a good time without getting too drunk or becoming too disruptive. That's especially hard on the ghost tours. People tend to get extra rowdy and be a little too liberal with their drinking when they're out after dark.

Whatever. I just need something to keep me afloat until I can figure out how to get my own business back on track. I have an appointment at the Small Business Resource Center tomorrow afternoon. Samantha told me they were very helpful to her. I wonder if they can tell me where all the classy people who want to do private tours have gone. Where did you go, romantic couples and well-heeled retirees? How do I find you?