Tour bus no. 43, decorated with brightly painted whales, rumbles past Ocean Park. Leslie Malcouronne of Oak Bluffs is at the wheel giving her spiel:
“On the right is the Corbin-Norton house. Back when my mother was in her teens, she dated Phil Corbin of Corbin Locks fame. She also dated Bill Ingraham of Ingraham Clocks fame, who lived next door. So ultimately she had to decide between Ingraham Clocks or Corbin Locks.”
Bah-da-bing!
Leslie works for Martha’s Vineyard Sightseeing and has been giving tours for more than twenty-five years. And as she puts it, to be successful you have to be part historian, part entertainer, and do it all while you’re driving a bus – no small feat especially in mid-summer traffic.
Leslie’s advice for would-be tour guides is to bone up on the facts, read the guidebooks and things like the “Hundred Years Ago Today” column in the Vineyard Gazette, and talk to other drivers and lots of people who live on-Island. Then put your spin on the story – make it your own.
“Now on the right is the Eyesore...the Seaview condos. Back in the day, it was the Sea View Hotel and it was where lots of Island kids bought their first drink – they weren’t real strict about IDs.”
In addition to vital statistics – how big is the Island, how many people live here, what do people do for a living – there are a handful of questions that seem to pop up on every tour.
Leading the list is: Where did Jackie O live?
Right after that is: Where does the president stay?
And then there’s anything to do with Jaws.
Carly and James? Not so much anymore.
The Island has changed in so many ways, and the tour bus business is no exception. In the old days, you didn’t need a special license to drive a tour bus and lots of college kids did it to earn money for school. Now all drivers have to have a CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) with a Passenger Endorsement, which cuts down on the eligible candidates.
But the biggest change has been the decrease in day-trippers as the Vineyard has evolved from a tourist destination to a resort destination. Leslie first began noticing it in the late nineties. At the peak of the boom, thirty or forty tour buses were going out every day. Today the number is more like ten or twelve. (A regular full tour lasts about two-and-a-half hours and goes all over the Island, and visitors sign up right off the boat.)
Charter tours, on the other hand, are way up. They have to be booked ahead of time and last about one-and-a-half hours with two hours set aside for exploring Edgartown. They also go to Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs but don’t go up-Island. Charter tours can also be customized: Leslie once had a family book a tour for their son’s fourteenth birthday party. There were only six kids and they just wanted to see Jaws sites.
Heading toward Vineyard Haven from Oak Bluffs, Leslie points out a large house on the left: “The home with the big trees was originally owned by the Phillips family of Phillips Milk of Magnesia fame and they called it Belly Acres.”
Which leads me to the question I most wanted answered: How much of this stuff is just made up?
Leslie confesses that the Belly Acres story is apocryphal but she just can’t resist – it always gets a laugh. But other than that, she says there’s really no need to embellish; there’s so much to work with on the Vineyard, she really doesn’t have to make up anything. And by and large, people love her tours and go out of their way to thank her for making their visits memorable.
Well, not quite everyone.
There was that one fellow who had been drinking and demanded that she let him off the bus. He wanted to go back over the bridge and go home. Leslie informed him that there was no bridge, but he wasn’t buying it. Finally the man’s wife cleared up the confusion: Apparently the gentleman had a few cocktails on the trip down and had passed out right after the Bourne Bridge. He woke up on the Vineyard and had missed the ferry ride entirely.
And don’t you just hate it when that happens?
