The Tour of All Tours Tour

Today's tour was both familiar and completely different from anything I've seen yet: I had the chance to give a first version of The Tour of All Tours and to then watch it as it was given to me. The route was familiar as it is a distillation of much of the work of the last two weeks and yet the effect was not something I was able to predict.  

My guide today was Andy who I will be working with a lot more now as we go into the final week since Andy will be giving the tour in German. This was his first real chance to see what The Tour of All Tours was and fortunately the reaction was positive. I'm sure he'd manage to give a engaging tour anyway but it helps when there is some belief in the material you're working with. This is Andy in front of the Kunst Museum explaining their tours. 

This was a lovely moment in the tour when, squeezed onto this car he talks about the car museum tours. Today we went through every location and defined the spot to speak from, where the listeners would be standing and how to move to the next location. It was technical work in a way but it has now more or less allowed us to fix the route and with that done it is possible to start accumulating details for the spoken descriptions that we will give. Watching someone else give a bare bones version of The Tour of All Tours has given me plenty of ideas of things to add to the text that I will now have to set about including. 

I'm conscious that I want to leave Andy enough time to be able to become familiar with the tour so this has set me a very definite timetable to work to, which is not such a bad thing. Not that we'll be making a very strict writerly work, this will have to remain a guided tour style of presentation but, it should be defined textually and have its own formal contours all the same, so my next 48 hours are quite definitely accounted for.