End of season report

I met lots of lovely people this year on the tours (I have some left to do). Most of my customers were from the USA but also from Canada, England, Ireland, and Australia. All of them had great attitudes, they were witty, funny, energetic, and great company. When I see tour guides like a Venetian tourguide I witnessed today with her 100 people walking five feet behind her, I ask myself how can anyone do this job if you do not get to know your customers, have coffee with them, make them your friends? Those hundred people can't even ask questions.

My tourists this year have been school teachers, lawyers, artists, financiers, retired folks, doctors, writers, farmers, airline pilots, politicians, musicians, salesmen, homemakers, parents, grandparents, kids. All interesting in themselves and also interested in Venice. Great fun. My job is easy. (Pic on left shows me with the McAllisters and on the right novelist Richard Russo and wife Barbara and figlie.)

As the water rises here and the visitors drain away, it is the time for our holiday (although Laurie is writing a new book)...trips to New York, Dublin, and England for friends and family, home repair projects which means buying new tools (yeah!), restarting a painting career, improving my Italian (haha), trying to catch an opera or two, doting over the new grandson to be born 8 December, reading more, rehearsing my part in Laurie's new pantomime ("Dick Whittington in Venice") for the January performances, badgering my wife to put me in her new novel, and most of all enjoying Venice in the winter, a beautiful place. You can get a feel of the medieval city as it empties..dark evenings, misty air, footsteps echoing, a few Venetians hunched over as they walk homeward, water lapping in the canals, fish mongers and vegetable and fruit stands in Campo S. Margarita, almost empty vaporettos. Byron provides my coda:

                             I saw from out the wave her structures rise

                             As from the stroke of the Enchanter's wand!                                             

                             A thousand Years their cloudy wings expand

                             Around me, and a dying  glory smiles...