I escorted my first tour on Saturday. Since we work on the ship, we are eligible to sign up to go on tours for free, we just need to keep track of the passengers and fill out a brief sheet at the tour's end. I had signed up to do this a couple of times before but had been unsuccessful. But Saturday my fortune changed, and I found myself assigned to accompany the tour going to Monaco, Monte Carlo, and the view from Eze.
I should start out by saying that I have been fighting a cold for the past week and Saturday it had reached it's apex. But I wasn't going to let my stuffy nose and mild cough disrupt my enjoyment of the day. I woke up at 6:15 am and got ready. I was anxious to make a good impression to the Shore Excursion people so they would know I took my job as escort seriously, so I wore a blue polo shirt and khaki pants. Even though the day was a little warm for pants, I thought my mild discomfort was a small price to pay for a job well done.
We got to the bus and I introduced myself to the tour guide, a poised Italian woman named Franca. She could have been 41 or 78- I have no idea. She had a sophisticated demeanor that not even her regulation-issued white polo shirt could hide, and I imagine she was mildly annoyed at having to lead a tour since it disrupted her morning routine of sipping bellinis and seducing the local tennis pro. As part of your tour escort duties you are supposed to get on the bus microphone and introduce yourself to the group and explain that you're there to make sure everyone gets back on the bus on time. However, due to a mixture of my general malaise and an onset of shyness, I decided that an introduction wouldn't be really necessary. Franca seemed to have everything under control, I reasoned, plus other former escorts had told me that they didn't always introduce themselves. This lapse in escort duties proved disastrous later on in the day.
Our first stop was at Eze, a medieval village that is now primarily used as a high end shopping spot. Franca explained that we would depart the bus, use the bathrooms in the parking lot, walk up the paved hill to Eze for shopping, and then meet back at the bus in one hour at 9:45. As I followed everyone to the bathrooms, I noticed a group of women break apart from the group and go back to the bus. Was I supposed to follow them, I asked myself? Would that be an invasion of their privacy? How big can this Eze place be, anyway? Assuring myself that my duty was to the group and not a rogue band of tour rebels, I followed everyone else up to the bathroom.
Franca led everyone up the driveway to the entrance of Eze. Eze itself has maintained all of its old world charm for the past several hundred years, and is a series of cobblestoned streets that gently roll upward to a beautiful view of the French Riviera before looping back to its gated entryway As I watched the group head inside for picture-taking and perfume-buying, I noticed the rogue three women were not among the numbers. Not wanting to be any more remiss in my escort duties than I already had been, I walked back down the hill to see if I could find where they had ended up.
They were at the bottom of the hill. And they were pissed off they had been left behind. And they were from New Jersey. It was three generations of confusion: the pear shaped grandmother, the bleach blond mother, and the winsome innocent daughter (therapists who deal with alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional families would describe her personality as "the peacemaker"). I was greeted by a symphony of bleatings. "Wheah did she go?" "She said she would waaaaait for everyone!" "I don't appreciate being left behind in a foreign country." I quickly shepherded them up the hill, which looked like the slope of K2 now that I was accompanied by a sixty-four year old with an apparent cardiac condition. She took frequent stops, clutching her chest a la Redd Foxx, and would say things like, "I don't think I can make it. My heart is racing! This isn't good for me."
Thanks to the Herculean efforts of the granddaughter, who offered cold water and would hop up the hill to demonstrate the ease of its ascent, we were finally able to reach the entrance of Eze. But the charming village had now transformed into a deserted ghost town, its rambling streets a confusing labyrinth. The tour group was nowhere in sight, which was met by further honkings from the goose brigade. Leaving the grandmother gasping at a scenic overlook, I offered to run up one of the streets to see if I could find the rest of the people. This trip proved fruitless, as did the next one, but on my third try I ran into a Spanish ten year old who was hopping down the steps who pointed me in the right direction. Now sweating lightly myself, I brought the three women back into the fold, blithely lying every time the grandmother asked if there were a lot more steps.
When the grandmother laid eyes on Franca, she pointed a trembling finger at her and, in a tone usually reserved for witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials, shouted, "You! You said theah would be time for us to go the bathroom!" Franca, ever poised and a little confused as to what this newfound member was talking about, smiled and replied that yes, there were bathrooms right around the corner. Two minutes of heated accusations followed, where they never mentioned the fact that they had returned to the bus, but they were finally won over by Franca's charm (and perhaps my mantra-like ramblings of "I'm sorry, it was my fault") and went off shopping. I went up to Franca, expecting her to be angry at me, but instead she rolled her eyes and hissed, "You come on this tour to see Eze! Not to use the bathroom!"
Eze itself was nice. I walked around and took a couple of pictures. A couple from Florida asked me to take their picture by the sign of Eze's luxury hotel. They had been sitting in the front seat of the tour bus and, when I had walked on, had read my nametag and barked, "Brendan! Where in the United States you from?" When I said Massachusetts, the guy said, "Yikes! I'm sorry!" He probably would have clapped me on the shoulder and offered to buy me a rum runner if I had still been within arm reach by that point. But now I was struggling to use their digital camera, which I could not for the life of me figure out, and they were having a further laugh at my expense.
"So, Massachusetts, huh?" the guy asked. "What's Billy Buckner up to these days?" I should point out this is probably where I probably hit rock bottom that day: unable to operate a standard digital camera and forced to talk about sports. Somehow, I was able to remember who Bill Buckner was (I should mention here that I have not lived in Massachusetts since 1998 and if you held a gun to my head and told me to name three members of the Red Sox starting lineup, my brains would be splattered on the back wall), and I mumbled something about "probably still letting balls go between his legs." The camera miraculously worked at this point and I took their picture. The woman threw a satisfied look at her image on the camera and said, "I just saw this place on 'Lifestyles on the Rich and Famous.'" At this point I realized both of these people were stuck in 1986 and left before they tried to sign me up for Hands Across America or engage me in a debate on the merits of New Coke.
At 9:42 I walked back down the hill with Franca. She got on the bus, and after a quick head count of passengers, realized there were three people missing. I got off the bus and started to run up the hill to retrieve the lost sheep, and quickly ran into the three New Jersians, sauntering down at a pace best described as leisurely. They seemed surprised that I had been looking for them and in no hurry to pick up the pace when I told them that everyone else was on the bus and waiting for them. The grandmother responded to this information by pulling a bedazzled red tank top out of a paper bag and telling me she just had to buy it because "you can't get stuff like this in the States."
They asked me what I did on the ship, and were totally surprised that I had been in the show they had seen on Wednesday. "Oh, yeah!" the mother exclaimed, "You were up there with the blond haired girl and the girl who looks like that lady from 'Cheers!'"
I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Beth has blond hair, so I knew she was safe from the "Cheers" comment, but I was worried that this woman was crazy enough to think that Jenny looked like Rhea Perlman. "Shelley Long?" I asked.
"No," the woman answered, her eyebrows clenched together as if she was trying to remember a complicated scientific equation.
"Um, Kirstie Alley?"
"Yeah! That's it! Kirstie Alley!" The woman pointed her finger at me excitedly. I didn't have the heart to tell her that Kirstie Alley was now best known for her alarming weight gain and not her "Back to School" days of foxiness. Even though I'm pretty sure the woman hasn't watched television in the past fifteen years, I did not relay this comparison to Jenny.
When we got back to the bus a lot of the passengers had plead mercy to the mounting heat and decided to wait outside. A hatchet-faced woman in a white tank top was smoking a cigarette by the bus' entrance. When she saw the missing passengers, she threw down her cigarette, squashed it with her foot, and shouted at them, "C'mon, let's go!" The New Jersians did not take kindly to this, and the grandmother asked who she thought she was telling them to hurry up? The woman said they were fifteen minutes late (it was ten o'clock by this point). The New Jersians were unphased, and the mother squawked, "We were told ten o'clock!" I had to admire her quick thinking and utter disregard for the truth. It temporarily shut up the smoker, who muttered, "Well, how come all of us got here at 9:45?" But the New Jersians ignored her, and clutching their postcards and red tank tops, strutted onto the bus.
Our next stop was Monaco. I think we got there riding the same road that Princess Grace was driving on when she died. I'm not sure, because I was trying to dry the profuse amount of back sweat that had accumulated on my shirt from sprinting up a cobblestoned French street in ninety degree heat. Plus, I was having trouble understanding Franca when she was talking. Her voice took on a hushed and reverential tone when she told the story of Princess Grace's death: how Princess Stephanie couldn't legally drive outside of Monaco and so the two switched places outside the principality's limits, and then the road's sharp curves proved too much for her. All the passengers seemed caught up in her story, even the woman who seemed to think Grace Kelley was most popular for her films where she danced alongside Fred Astaire.
When we got off the bus, I decided I wasn't going to let history repeat itself and always remained an arm's length away from the New Jersians. This caused me to basically repeat everything that Franca told the tour group, as the older generations of the group were engaged in actively not listening to anything going around them. I think by the end they must have thought I was some Prince Rainier superfan, as I seemed to have an endless supply of knowledge about his family, including but not limited to which mansion was Stephanie's and which was Caroline's, how to tell if Albert was in the palace at any given time, which grave was Prince Rainier's and which was Princess Grace's, and the significance of Princess Grace's epitaph: "Gratia Patricia."
Later when I was looking through some old postcards the grandmother came up to me. Since it's the 25th anniversary of Princess Grace's death (another fact the family was impressed that I knew), her family has released a series of postcards of old publicity shots from her movies.
"Have you found any with William Holden?" she asked me.
I told her I hadn't and she sighed.
"He was my favorite," she said. "He still is. I watch all his movies and it's like he's still here."
She smiled sadly and went back to rifling through postcards of famous movie stars, now long gone. She ended up with one of Grace Kelley and Dizzie Gillespie and I picked one of the royal family in 1981. I got the New Jersians safely back to the bus on time, but a middle-aged couple decided to be ten minutes late so no one really noticed.
We then drove to Monte Carlo and spent about a half hour there. Monte Carlo was kind of lost on me, because to truly appreciate it you have to have one of the following: an insane amount of money, a mild gambling addiction, and an appreciation of foreign sports cars. Parents would have their kids line up next to the Porsches and Ferraris parked outside of the casino and discreetly take their picture. I walked around aimlessly and took pictures of the fountains, but after that I didn't really know what to do. I ended up taking a picture of an expensive necklace in the Bulgari window, but felt foolish when people from the tour walked by and shouted, "Get it!" I wish I had had the wherewithal to tell them I was scoping the store out for my jewelry heist.
The drive back was done in quiet, except for the family from New Hampshire sitting next to me who documented each car dealership we drove by (for the record, their oldest daughter is mad at Saab right now for the poor repair job they have done on her car). We arrived back in port, I said goodbye to my new best friend Franca, waved goodbye to the New Jersians, and returned to the ship to wash off the layer of salt from my body.
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