It Starts

At 6 PM we follow the cacaphony of raised voices into the bar where old friends greet each other and introduce themselves to new friends they haven’t met yet.

One of the preparatory phases of the tour is for our leaders to gather brief bios, 2-4 paragraphs written by each and every tour member, but no pictures, assemble them, and send them back out to the whole group as a snail mailed document to be brought along on the tour, so we can study up in advance and review as we go along. This whets the interest to know about tour member tidbits and details, and a function of the first meeting and dinner together is to start associating faces with names and backgrounds. Then through the tour folks go back to the bios after dinner to review and reinforce.

Paula’s goal is to know every name and associated face as early in the tour as she can, and to sit with every person on the tour at one or more meals. My personal goal is to hear anything amid the hubbub.