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Fall is here and it’s time for the roundup of September 2019 posts.

Nights start sooner and last longer. The shadows take their time shrinking in the morning and hold the cold during the day. My tomatoes are hanging in there but take a long time to ripen. While the weather here has remained delightfully warm right into October, we know that colder temperatures are on their way. The thermometer swings up and down from day to day and sometimes from hour to hour. We dress in layers.

The Spider Who Came Along for the Ride

Here in Boston, we have entered the high season for ghost tours. My Haunted Boston calendar has filled up and it would be even more crowded except that I won’t sign up for tours that start after 8:00 pm. It just takes me too long to get home afterward.

A couple of weeks ago, I was about to hang my lantern on the fence around the Central Burying Ground when I saw, silhouetted in the lights from Boylston Street, a spider on one of the fence spikes. I moved my lantern over and kept talking. At the end of the tour, one of my guests looked at my lantern where it sat on a table and said, “Well, look who came along for the ride.”

Turns out I had been carrying that spider along with me for an hour. Fortunately, my guest let it crawl on his hand and took it outside. The following week, I told another group this story. Two stops later, one of them reached out and brushed something off my jacket. When I asked what it was, she said, “A spider.” I think she saw on the web that it was a good tour.

Adding a Bus to the Tour Season

Last month I started giving bus tours of Boston for a company that works with the big cruise ships that come to the city. The compensation is good; the tips are excellent. I drive to the cruise port and walk to where these enormous floating cities have docked. There may be one, two, or three of them, depending on the day.

This passenger stayed on the ship

I pick up my tour sheet, find my bus driver and introduce myself, then wait for the flood of people to emerge. I take their tickets, count heads, and then we roll. I talk almost the whole time we’re going from site to site. The guests learn a lot about Boston from the ground up on my tours and seem to like it.

I’m saving my earnings for our next Viking River Cruise. This month, two of Viking’s ocean ships, Viking Sea, is coming to town and I’m leading a tour on Saturday. If you take Panoramic Boston, you ride with me.

Roundup of September 2019 Posts

These tours have interfered with my writing schedule, though. All of my writing projects have suffered from inattention, including this blog. Thank goodness for Susanne and Jackie, who have kept new posts coming.

I look forward to getting back to a normal writing schedule in November. In the meantime, here is the roundup of September 2019 posts.