Tour Guide Honor Roll!
In the last 3 weeks I've taken a bunch of tours, and not surprisingly there are hits and there are misses. Here's a selection of the tour guide hits.
At the Toyota factory in Georgetown, KY, I had a personal 1-on-1 tour (not one of the other 75 people signed up and ahead of me on the waitlist for the tour that day showed up!). Mary June was my expert guide for the full hour-plus, telling me about rocker panels and kaizen, projecting pride in the product like the new Venza ("V-E-N-Z-A" she made sure I knew how it was spelled) and explaining the system to stop the line if quality issues ("Andon, and-on, two English words make one ancient Japanese word meaning 'lantern'"). She also waved at all of the factory workers and they all waved back. "I used to be an educator and a lot of these were my students. That one over there, he was real cute," she said. At the end of the tour, I asked to take a picture with her, and she actually got out her camera to take a picture with me too! Apparently she had started to document each day of her life in 2009 with a picture, and January 30 was with me! This was a GREAT start to the roadtrip.
At Mesa Verde National Park, we had Ranger Craig tell us about Spruce Tree House. What a character! He was an encyclopedia of knowledge, able to talk 5 minutes on whatever question we had whether it was about the flora in the region or the Puebloan people's culture.
At Petrified Forest National Park, we had Ranger Rita who was also super excited about her park, and super eloquent telling us about archosaurs and hydrated silica. She took us off the Giant Logs trail to a part that was just carpeted with petrified wood. It was sad because the rest of the trail used to look like that, only visitors have stolen most of the small pieces. So our little group just walked on top of this carpet and looked for petrified wood, roots, and animal fossils. Here she is exhibiting how to tell if what you have is a fossil of a bone or not (it sticks to your tongue).
