JoAnn and I used the barely-a-couple of hours of daylight after 5pm on Tuesday to walk around downtown Rochester. The Rochester tourism table at the convention had included a flyer with 3 phone numbers for 3 walking tours. You call from your cellphone and input a credit card number to get charged $5, and then you have access for the next 24 hours to call that number from your cellphone, punch in a number and hear information about that stop on the walking tour.

The flyer said where to start for each of the 3 tours, so I figured the recording on the phone would say "now turn left and walk..." as a museum audio guide would. However, the recording said "Number 2 on your map..." Uh, what map? (I checked with the tourism lady at the table the next day, and she knew nothing about any map. I must be the first customer they have had for the service.) Fortunately, I had a generic downtown map, no stop was more than 2 blocks from the one before it, and JoAnn and I were good at figuring out what they were talking about. The only thing was that we kept having to click the next number, listen for a sentence or two, and then hang up and walk to the next spot before calling back and listening again from the beginning of that stop.

It's actually a good thing that there was some brainwork necessary, because the walk itself was pretty damn boring. Apparently, most of the character of the downtown neighborhood was torn down when the city decided it didn't like having a lot of industry around the Genesee River, and they tore down the working buildings to build the convention center area. For the remaining buildings, the tour mostly gave what type of architecture it was and who the tenants were over the decades.




The Erie Canal Aqueduct


My favorite building downtown


On top of another building, Mercury holds up a bag of money. Srsly.