Hello to all of our new and continuing members.

In the past month from May 15^th to the present, I have had the pleasure to conduct tours for hundreds of people to and of

1. Tunnel Tours A
2. Tunnel Tours B
3. A customized Presidential Tour A and B
4. Heights Tour B
5. Texas Medical Center (TMC) Walking Tour C
6. City Tours C, D, and E
7. Haunted Tour Y

It is always good to keep busy.

As I write this, it is almost Father’s Day. If you want to schedule a tour for your dad anytime in June, we will give him a FREE local tour provided that at least two other people pay full price for that same tour. Buy 2, get 1 free. That is a 33% discount. This is a good deal! Find a father to adopt. LOL.

I want to share some information about what goes into creating a tour. Before we run any tour, we have to put in generally 10 times the amount of time to actually run a tour. For example, if one wants a 5 hour tour, I spend 50 hours to create it. I have to:

• Create a theme for the tour.
• Make an educated guess as to how long the tour should be and what can be included in a designated number of hours.
• Develop a route.
• Spend hours on Google Maps or Mapquest. (When I began the company in 2000, using this technology was not readily available.)
• Type up a detailed minutia route with the time of every turn and location.
• Program stops in a GPS. (I bought my first GPS in 2007 for $500.00. That was a real luxury item. Before GPSs, I had to run the routes more times in advance of a tour than I do now. It was much more time-consuming, but it made me memorize a lot of driving information. I now have GPSs in all of my vehicles.)
• Run the route.
• Meet with people and or get off at sites to see if they are worth including on the tour.
• Make corrections to the route. I almost always make initial mistakes based on what streets are open, what streets are wide enough for buses, what streets do not have low hanging branches, low bridges, or other obstacles that will create problems and scratch up vehicles.
• Make changes to the route. Sometimes buildings that are allegedly still standing have been bulldozed, moved, or remodeled.
• Edit the typed route.
• Run the route again.
• Make more corrections.
• Edit the typed route again.
• Run the route again.
• Adjust the time of the tour as necessary and create a variety of different lengths of tours based on what can be included in a given time-frame.
• Research documentation on the history of any number of sites that we pass and or stop at as well as people relevant to events and the events themselves that took on the route of a tour.
• Identify clean sites for bathrooms every 1.5 to 2.0 hours. This might sound funny to some people, but the average tourist is a senior citizen and clean bathrooms in a timely period in a safe area is important to most tourists.
• Identify sites for appropriate restaurants that are large enough to serve and seat large groups of people if necessary. I have eaten at many good restaurants that are on our tours, and many bad and or expensive or poor service restaurants that do not make the cut.
• Edit the typed route again.
• Run the route again.
• Put together a binder with all of the above information that has been acquired for what is needed and what may be needed when clients ask questions: route information, biographies historic people, addresses, telephone numbers, and the name of the contact people who we may need to call to them they we are on our way to visit their institution, reference materials, historic photos when possible, and the history of the events and institutions. All of this has to be in an orderly manner so I can quickly find and share the information with tourists.
• Decide on what are reasonable prices for the number of people and hours of any tour.
• Create price tables for quickly providing quotes for customers as well as for us so I am always consistent.

From the time that we first conceive of a tour or our clients suggest a tour that they think we should include, typically 6 months pass before we can implement it. Remember that we have to create the tour during the times that we are not already conducting and planning other tours for paying clients. A forty hour work week is for a slacker.

As for me, I am going to be a slacker this month. LOL. I am taking a vacation from Saturday, June 16^th through Sunday, June 24^th. I am taking an 8-day, 7-night cruise of Hawaii. My non-stop flight departs in a few more hours from IAH to Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. For those of you are unfamiliar with Hawaii, the state has four major islands and lots of small ones. The major islands are Oahu, Maui, Hawaii, and Kauai. This will be my first trip to Hawaii. I will board a cruise ship later today and take off as we visit all of the major islands. I have signed up for 7 excursions (tours) so far, including at least one on each island to learn of the people, culture, geography, history, values, and anything else that I can absorb. I am getting a volcano special. LOL. As Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano continues to explode, people are panicking and cancelling their vacations and trips to Hawaii. The reality is that the volcano is on only one tip of one island and will have little to no effect on tourists anywhere else. (Imagine if in late August 2017, people from other states and nations who had planned vacations to San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, or Fort Worth began cancelling them because they saw that Houston was under water from Hurricane Harvey. Harvey did not cause any significant damage to the aforementioned metropolitan areas.) The tourist industry is desperate to bring people into Hawaii as tourism is a major source of the state’s revenue and, of course, the cruise ships’ profits. My cruise is costing only about 1/3 to ¼ the normal price of a cruise. My airfare will cost more than the cruise. The excursions will cost almost as much as the cruise.

As I built up my company, I could not afford in expense or time to neglect my company for over 10 years. I took no vacations for more than a decade. I used to teach at Houston Community College (HCC) history and government year round so that I had a steady flow of income. Sometimes, I also taught at Texas Southern University (TSU), Alvin Community College (ACC), and Wharton County Junior College (WCJC) to supplement my income. Now, I collect a pension as a retiree in the state of Texas. Now, I have other tour guides who pick up the slack. Now, I want to be the tourist, instead of the tour guide. Ha, ha. Wish me well!

If you know anyone who would be interested in receiving our blogs, please let us know at houstonhistory@aol.com. Provide a clear name and email address for the person or group and we will sign them up. Thanks.

See you on a tour.

Sincerely,

Keith Rosen
Houston Historical Tours
P. O. Box 262404
Houston, Texas 77207-2404
(713) 392-0867
(713) 643-4086 Fax
houstonhistory@aol.com
www.houstonhistoricaltours.com

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