Vacation Memories : Kurt Was the Tour Guide We All Hated to Love

He was standing on tiptoe in the tourist lobby of what was then the Cunard Hotel in London’s Hammersmith District, checking names against a list and trying to keep his group separate from the dozen other groups in the huge room.

My wife, who tends to see chaos as pageantry, was caught up in the excitement of the forming-up of our first real European tour. I was not.

Without explanation, our tour guide had just collected our passports. He then introduced himself as an Austrian and said his first name was Kurt. “You will not need my last name. You would not anyway remember it.”

The man had a way with words.

“Because there are so many groups here, you will pay attention very close to me. You will put your luggage in a line right here, with the tags on the handles and the red dots on the tags up. The porters cannot get the right bags on the right buses if they cannot find them, ya ?

“No, misses, you are not having to straddle the bags. You are in the Cunard Hotel. Once in a while a steamship they lose, never a bag. Ha-ha, I make the joke. In a line, tags on handles, dots up.”

An Urge Resisted

My inclination was to move the bags out of line, tie the tags to the straps instead of the handles and turn the dots down. But on the chance that our bags might have wound up on an African safari, I contained myself.

My wife, Joyce, was no comfort. “Let’s remember how much we’re paying for this before we lose our tempers and declare World War III on this man, OK?”

I, in the vernacular of my kids, cooled it, even allowing Kurt to win in that contact sport called shaking hands. My fingers felt as if they were webbed for hours. At least I think I let him win.

On the third day, after the tour of Amsterdam, our driver stopped the big air-conditioned bus and Kurt gave us our orders for the tour of what he called the diamond factory.

“After you are through in the factory,” he said, “you can go through the showrooms and buy something if you wish. But remember, you are here to see Europe, not to buy it. Then you will have your lunch and be back here on the bus by 2:30, no later. That will be the case.”

‘Or Else What?’

I was getting thin-lipped and was about to say something regrettable when another passenger beat me to it.

“Or else what?” the passenger, a woman, asked.

Kurt acted as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. “What was that, madam?”

“Or else what?” she repeated. “What are you going to do to us if we are late getting back to the bus? Are you going to have us shot or clap us in irons? We are paying you to be our guide, not a little dictator. So if you see us coming back to the bus late, what are you going to do about it?”

He paused for a moment, in apparent dismay, before answering. “First, madam, I am not a little dictator. Five-feet-five is quite tall for an Austrian. Second, if you come back late when I send you out on your own, then I will not be able to show you the Europe you came to see. You have spent a great deal of money. For some the realization of a lifelong dream it is. And you must see Europe, because unless you are a red Indian, here your roots are.

“A few thoughtless people who can’t get places on time we will let spoil that? No, we will not! You will see Europe. Memories for your old age I will make you. Back on the bus, 2:30, no later!”

With that the driver opened the door and all of us, without further words, filed off. Shortly before 2:30 we all filed back on.

After that incident I went from grumpy to a state describable as “confused-grumpy.” “Feeling put upon,” Joyce asked, “because someone else is making the decisions for you?”

I wasn’t going to let her play that game. I remained sullen and silent.

Like at the Office?

“That’s why we came on this tour? So you could make a bunch of decisions, like back at the office?”

As always with my wife in situations like this, I skipped the offensive and went immediately to the defensive: “But don’t you think he goes a little overboard? I mean even the loo stops. . . .”

“And nice clean loos they’ve been. He’s kept us straight on the tipping too. There aren’t any Band-Aids on any of us.”

She was refering to a little old blue-haired lady we’d met back at the Cunard who had just finished her tour. When asked about the Band-Aid on her forehead, she had become vocal about her tour guide not keeping her group advised on money and local customs.

At a rest stop in Northern Italy the woman had put a German pfennig instead of a 100-lira piece into the tip plate as she walked into the restroom.

The elderly lady pensioner, whose job it was to keep the restrooms clean, took umbrage over the nationality and the size of the tip and followed her in. There was a brief discussion, in two languages, which rapidly deteriorated into a shouting match, climaxing with the elderly attendant blocking the entrance of the single booth with her body and outstretched arms.

At that the blue-haired woman, attempting to leave in a huff, pulled open a door, straightened her back and, nose in the air, marched into the cleaning equipment room. She did not realize her mistake before catching the edge of a mop rack with her forehead.

“Nothing like that happened to any of us,” Joyce said. “Besides, who would you rather have for a tour guide, Mary Poppins?”

Benevolence Blooms

My wife had made her point. As the days went by, Kurt became less and less abrasive and more and more the benevolent dictator, his personality gradually changing with the countries we were passing through.

By the time we got to Italy he was talking with his hands, wearing no tie and drinking red wine with the best of us. Or the worst of us.

There was nothing the brochure said we would see that we did not see, though at times Kurt really had to work at it.

On one occasion he called out for everybody on the bus to “Wake up! Look out the windows, you did not come to Europe to sleep. You are passing through the mountains from Michelangelo his marble cut. Save the sleep for when you are dead. Then you will have plenty of sleep. Wake up! Wake up!”

When we went to the nightclubs in Paris, he made sure we were seated in the first three rows. “Body stockings they do not wear. You see. I show you.” Sure enough, there were no body stockings.

At the special dinners he made sure the food was right, and more than one plate went back to the kitchen because it hadn’t lived up to Kurt’s idea of what an American should receive for his first meal in Paris or Rome or Lucerne.

Patton’s Tanks

Some days, when there were longer distances to travel, he would tell us of the history of the countries we were passing through or fill us in on some of his own history; reflections on the arrival of the American Army in his little Austrian village when he was a boy. And how impressed he was when Patton’s tanks thundered down the road he lived on, shaking the house like a series of avalanches.

Toward the end of the tour we were having our farewell dinner in a little restaurant on the square in Montmartre when one of the other tourists approached and asked if we were going to give Kurt the standard tip, a dollar a day per person, or if we were going to tip him at all, considering how bossy he’s been.

“Not tip him?” I asked.

“Almost a month with no responsibilities. Freedom from decisions. Being led, practically by the hand, through a Europe I could never even have found on my own by one of the finest teachers I have ever known. Not tip Kurt? Ridiculous!”

We did tip him, but not well enough. Neither my wife nor I was to realize for many years what a truly extraordinary tour manager he was. Bossy, yes, as authoritarian as he needed to be to get 38 Americans to make the best possible use of their 3 1/2 weeks in Europe.

His name was Kurt Gmiener and we heard he became an executive with his company. At last report he was arranging tours of the United States.

If there were a chance he’d be conducting one of those tours himself I think my wife and I might go, if for no other reason than to hear him shout, “Wake up! Wake up! This is the Santa Fe Trail, the Pony Express rode here their horses. You did not come to America to sleep, you know. There will be time later, when you are dead. Wake up! Wake up!”

And he said I wouldn’t anyway remember his name.

It was the only time he was wrong.