Now I are a tram tour driver and docent at the Pima Air & Space Museum. Over the past two weeks, I:
1) Rode along on a few tours to see how other driver/docents handled the job and to listen to what they had to say about outdoor aircraft on display.
2) Wrote up an 11-page set of notes, single spaced, airplane by airplane (those are my notes at left).
3) Drove the route by myself in a borrowed golf cart, practicing my spiel.
This morning, dear reader, I did it live with 30 paying visitors and now I am certified, good to go, cleared solo, the newest member of the tram team.
Guess which one I get to drive?
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If you guessed the one on the left, dream on. Air conditioning is for pussies!
I never counted the outdoor aircraft covered on tram tours. I knew we didn’t have to talk about all of them, but the driver/docents I rode with talked about most, so I determined to do the same. I didn’t count the airplanes in my 11 pages of notes, either, but assumed it was about 100. After my certification tour today, the team leader who evaluated me said I narrated 121 airplanes during the 1-hour, 5-minute tour. I had no idea it would be that many. It makes it sound like too much, even for the most avid visitor, but as a friend on Facebook pointed out, that’s less than two airplanes per minute, so it’s not as rushed a tour as it sounds.
So, on to a new page at the air museum. I’m down for two last walking tours, next Wednesday and the Wednesday after. They haven’t given me a regular day for tram tours; they’ll probably have me fill in as a substitute until a day opens up.
That’s the news for now. I’ll keep you posted.