By Jay Whipple
Trend Magazine Online™
Well Done!
Trend Magazine Online™
Well Done!
This walking tour was part of a Tour Guide Certification
Course that I completed at Miami Dade College North in early 2016.
It was in preparation for our upcoming tours here in South
Florida. Rewind the tape back to the late 1960's and I was on the
same campus taking gymnastics class as part of my curriculum at Lillie C.
Evans Elementary School near Liberty City in Miami, Fl.
The campus was yet a decade old and I remember it as being called Miami Dade
Community College back in those days. I must be getting older because the
students on campus looked like they belonged in grade school themselves. Smile!
The course was very intense and compacted into six
weeks with a lot of ground to cover to include taking this and other tours,
visiting museums and other area attractions and neighborhoods, as well as
learning Miami, South Florida, and Florida history. People
think that because you were born in a place that automatically makes you a tour
guide of sorts. Not! That is why we get paid handsomely to do what we do after
hours, days, weeks, months, and years of constant learning. In short, no one knows
all the history of a place except our creator; tour guides, however, know more
than 98% of the locals and longtime residents simply because it's what
we are well compensated to do.
One of the issues that I worried about was parking. If
you have visited South Beach via automobile you know what I mean. There
are No Parking Signs everywhere! As such I decide to call the South
Beach visitor center before my visit and they were kind enough to steer me
to a reasonably priced parking garage/deck just blocks away on I think 7th
Street. I seem to remember the cost being about $4 or so for about
three hours of parking and the walk to the tour starting point at 10th
and Ocean Drive was an easy 5 minutes or so.
