Walking Tour

For this walking tour I did the Central Spokane tour of the Downtown Spokane Heritage Walk.  I did this tour on Saturday, and began the tour at 5 PM.  The tour took me all over downtown, including some of my stops that I will be highlighting for Spokane Historical.

On the tour I went to the locations, taking pictures as I went.  Originally I had planned on posting on every stop, but I figured I'd make a collage of my photos and explain the essence of the tour, rather than going over every particular stop.

The tour was quite enjoyable, as it took about 1.5 hours to complete and took me to 18 stops in Spokane.  One of the major downfalls of the tour, was that it relied on a paper map, therefore you were constantly looking down to read the map rather than enjoying Central Downtown Spokane.  The terrain of the tour was very flat, which was nice.

The tour was planned out fairly well, there wasn't much backtracking, which I find to be a bit boring.  The tour information was an incredibly short paragraph highlighting the key points of historical relevance of the sites.  I believe the tour was designed to give people a brief understanding of some of the historically significant places in Spokane, but not overwhelm them.

One key issue with the tour, that could be easily fixed, was the lack of restrooms on the map.  I understand that businesses can't have tons of tourists in their establishments to use the restroom and leave, however if certain bars would be willing to open up their facilities, they might find that their business would increase.  If we could work with some bars / restaurants / buildings to allow Spokane Historical highlight restrooms downtown during the tours, with perhaps a different colored tag or pin on the map, I believe the user experience would be easier.

The tour as a whole was informative, kinda long, and would have been better with a touring buddy.  However, the tour did take me to mangy of the historically significant buildings downtown.  I thought I might run into someone doing the same thing as I was, however I ran into no other people taking the walking tour of Spokane.  If I was grading the tour, it would get a solid 3 / 5, that is the tour did everything you would expect and nothing more.

This tour could be improved by expanded explanation of buildings, maybe the inclusion of some technology (QR Codes, SCVGR, or Geocaching).  However the tour isn't built around such things, which gives Spokane Historical the opportunity to take advantage of this missed opportunity and to create a much more innovative, interactive tour.