And then there were 43
How’s this for your favorite anxiety dream? You decide to pop into one more shop, and when you come out, your tour bus is gone.
No dream for the two women on our tour today. Our guide left them in Oxford. He knew he left them. They weren’t at the pickup spot at the appointed hour, and he decided the rest of us shouldn’t wait. So while the driver drove away with 43 of us on board so we could go enjoy (not) a quaint lunch at a quaint English pub in the countryside, the guide stayed behind to see if the two women showed up.
Since the guide didn’t exactly know what the women looked like, and he had meanwhile taken off his loud obnoxious, highly-identifiable tie, and the big tour bus with the tour name on it was gone–finding them wasn’t really a good bet.
The worst of it is, the women’s elderly relative–a guy who looked about 105–was still on the bus with us. So imagine what a good time he had. Adding to the problem of his two companions being left behind in an unfamiliar city, this man didn’t think they had any money with them.
Fabulous.
So the guide shows up (by taxi) at the end of lunch–without the missing tourists–and he’s all cheery and “oh,well,” and the tour just goes on. And believe me, from then on any time the guide gave us a time to be back at the bus, we all beat it by at least 10 minutes.
We abandoned those women at noon. The tour bus just brought us back to London at 7:30 tonight. And the women still aren’t back at their hotel–the guide called the hotel from the bus to check.
He got on the loudspeaker to give us that update. Then he shrugged. “Guess this is just one of those situations where I’ll never know what happened.”
Gee, we hope you’re not too UPSET by that!!!
And THEN! For the last half hour of our trip, the guide gives us this non-stop spiel about how the tipping is different from country to country, and he had these low-class Americans on a tour this week and they didn’t understand what’s appropriate, and just in case we were wondering, here’s a few pointers on how much to tip.
EXCUSE ME??? You’re thinking today was a good day?
So here I am back in my hotel, and I, like the guide, “guess I’ll never know” what happened to those two women.
Now let me just mention that bloggers typically get 15%.
Technorati Tags: Oxford Tour, England
June 28th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Ahhh - reminds me of the time I got left behind on an African Safari. I’ll never know what the people on the tour saw now.
I only got to lasso the horn of a charging rhino with my belt to be dragged safely away from the converging pack of lions and hyenas. I didn’t see ANY giraffes.
Or maybe that was just the Safari ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
I’m not sure.