We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick for the places we have never known."
- Carson McCullers
How and why do we travel?
We are a family who likes to travel. It's an exploration of landscapes and cultures that gives us new perspective on life. Our travel is best described as a trip or adventure, meaning it has a cultural or educational purpose. Most trips include appreciation of local specialties, visiting art and science museums, and taking cooking courses (a true art and science!).
Rick Steves has decades of experience and has curated his expertise into resources to prepare anyone to be a smart traveler. While we have studied his resources for years in various forms (tv, radio, web and print), for our first adventure in Europe, we opted to join a fully guided family tour. For us, it was similar to a classic college course where you read the materials and then put that knowledge into practice in the accompanying laboratory.
While we had the initial teachings, observations, and experience in our guided tour, we chose to follow up in 2016 with a My Way tour that took almost the same route through Europe. This gave us some safety with our tour escort and expert driver and more independence to revisit favorite places any complete any unfinished business from our first trip. This experience built even more confidence where we are now fully prepared to continue smart travel completely on our own.
Will we join another tour? Of course! Can we confidently travel on our own with our Rick Steves' resources guiding us? We already have with a visit to Paris and Bruges in February of 2017. Could we have organized tickets on a high speed train from Paris to Brussels on our own before 2013? Yes, but probably not as effortlessly as we did with the knowledge gained on our tours.
Rick Steves has decades of experience and has curated his expertise into resources to prepare anyone to be a smart traveler. While we have studied his resources for years in various forms (tv, radio, web and print), for our first adventure in Europe, we opted to join a fully guided family tour. For us, it was similar to a classic college course where you read the materials and then put that knowledge into practice in the accompanying laboratory.
While we had the initial teachings, observations, and experience in our guided tour, we chose to follow up in 2016 with a My Way tour that took almost the same route through Europe. This gave us some safety with our tour escort and expert driver and more independence to revisit favorite places any complete any unfinished business from our first trip. This experience built even more confidence where we are now fully prepared to continue smart travel completely on our own.
Will we join another tour? Of course! Can we confidently travel on our own with our Rick Steves' resources guiding us? We already have with a visit to Paris and Bruges in February of 2017. Could we have organized tickets on a high speed train from Paris to Brussels on our own before 2013? Yes, but probably not as effortlessly as we did with the knowledge gained on our tours.
What did we bring?
We also had 2 pairs of comfortable shoes per person...
It's really helpful to alternate shoes each day and they should be comfortable enough for walking and standing. Our pedometer registered 253,967 steps on our trip, which is approximately 126 miles over the course of three weeks (5-10 miles per day)!