The Lactose-Intolerant Bus

I have been leading walking tours of downtown St. Louis on Saturdays for a decade now.  After a few years of downtown tours, I decided to branch out and lead walking tours of various neighborhoods in St. Louis.

This year, I really branched out: I chose a neighborhood that was too big for walking.  I needed to rent a bus.

The neighborhood was the Near North Riverfront, the most isolated neighborhood in St. Louis.  Squeezed between Interstate-70 and the Mississippi River, it is five miles long and only a few blocks wide.  Very much a working neighborhood: 200 companies are situated in the Near North Riverfront, while there are only 550 residents.

With so few residents, nothing is open in the Near North Riverfront on a Saturday.  Therefore, I needed to rent a bus with a restroom.  I went to the bus company, decided on a 36-seat bus, and signed a contract.

Signing a contract opened the door to lots of things to worry about.

I maintain a list of email addresses of people who have been on my previous tours.  I sent out an announcement, and questions flooded into my mind.  What if nobody wants to come on my tour?  What if the bus wasn’t full and I had to subsidize the tour?  What if the bus was full and I had to turn people away?

I set myself up on PayPal so people could pay in advance.

 

Turns out some people hate PayPal.  They sent me checks.  Some people claimed PayPal hates them.  More checks.  Someone uses a computer in a public library and is nervous about PayPal.  One more check.  Some people dawdled about using PayPal.

The bus list finally filled up and people finally paid up.  Now I had a new set of worries.

What if the bus shows up late?  What if the restroom doesn’t work?  What if the air conditioning is faulty?  What if some of the attendees are late? 

My biggest worry: what if someone tries to bring dairy products on board?  I sent out an email to the attendees telling them that beer, wine, and soda were OK, but they could not bring dairy products.

I got an email back saying that I was treating people like grade school children.

So, I had to go into details.  The bus company forbids dairy products.   The reason: The bus sits in a big lot in the blazing sun, and if someone had spilled milk in the bus, the bus would start to stink.  I would be responsible for making the bus rentable again ($95 bucks an hour)...and the bus company had made it clear that they were keeping my credit card number on file just in case.

Came the day of the tour: The weather was good, the bus was on time, and all 36 attendees were on time.  We were ready to visit St. Louis’ most isolated neighborhood with not a single dairy product on board.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

She Would Rather Smoke Crack

When Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she would rather smoke crack than eat cheese in a can, I wondered why she thought cheese in a can was so horrid.

I like cheese in a can.  

In 1975 I lived in Sokoto, Nigeria, near the edge of the Sahara Desert.  There was only one kind of cheese produced in Sokoto: camel milk cheese.  There must be something special about camel milk because this cheese was very hard.  It had grooves in it and reminded me of white shingles that Americans use for siding their homes.

In a city where temperatures have been known to hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit, you need a cheese that is going to survive without refrigeration.  Camel milk cheese fit the bill, but it did not fit my idea of dairy sanitation.

If you stopped at a little neighborhood shop in Sokoto, you would find cigarettes, soft drinks, bread, laundry powder, and umbrellas.  You will also find Kraft cheese in a can --- a blue can from Australia.

I bought cans of Kraft cheese.  I made grilled cheese sandwiches.  I found that Kraft cheese pairs nicely with Nigerian beer.  I liked knowing that being geographically remote did not mean being cut off from cheese, even if it did come in a can.

Now I see that Kraft has started a campaign to import its blue cans of cheese into the United States.  The United States has plenty of cheese produced in nice sanitary conditions.  Who would buy these blue cans?

Survivalists.  

Kraft is marketing this “previously unavailable” cheese for disaster preparedness.  Any cheese that could survive sitting on a shelf in a neighborhood shop in Sokoto, Nigeria, can definitely claim to be survival cheese.

Cheese in a can made my life in Nigeria better.  Cheese in a can could save someone's life in post-Apocalyptic America.  So, why does Gwyneth despise it?

Oops, wrong cheese in a can.  

I think Gwyneth was talking about aerosol squirty cheese in cans, not my beloved blue cans of Kraft cheese.  OK…maybe crack is preferable to Easy Cheese squirted on a cracker.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com