If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium or Amsterdam or......

My very first guided tour, oh yes I have reached that age when a guided tour sounds good, I may be crazy but it sounds like a great adventure. Starting out in Amsterdam and finishing up in Paris.

Shish...Whew... all in 21 days of travel....lots of bus and trains, planes, and automobiles.....and I don't have to drive, navigate or even negotiate parking, so I can sit back and relax and knit or just gaze out the window or finally read that book that I've had on my list of things I would like to do.



I've traveled through most of these places so they are not so new to me but I am sure I will see lots of things that I have never seen before. I think having professional tour guides help to steer us in the most interesting areas. (I've always wanted to be part of a heard.) When I was younger that was the thrilling part of traveling, finding my own path and planning my own tour. But it is a lot of work and taking off without a reservation well when I was 18 that was the way to go but today having someone else make all the reservations and plans sounds good to me. I figure none of the tours are mandatory and I can always stay back at the hotel and do what I feel like and only participate when I feel like it.

But I have lots of time to think about this and make my plans, the tour is next year!

This is what the brochure tells me in what is included:

All tours and admissions, covering more than two dozen group sightseeing events • Amsterdam walking tour • Rijksmuseum • Anne Frank House • Dutch Open Air Museum • Rhine cruise • Rheinfels Castle • Bacharach walking tour • Dachau concentration camp • mountain luge ride (season and weather permitting) • Neuschwanstein Castle • Florence walking tour • Uffizi Gallery • Florence's Accademia including Michelangelo's David • Italian hill town walk • floodlit night walk through Rome • Colosseum • Forum • Pantheon • St. Peter's Basilica • Vatican Museum • orientation for "vacation" days on Italian Riviera and in Swiss Alps • wine tasting in Burgundy • Louvre Museum • Paris walking tour • Nôtre Dame • one-day Paris Museum Pass giving you free entry to Ste. Chapelle, the Louvre, Orsay, and Rodin museums …and more.


I used to keep a diary when I was about her age, I too instinctively knew that what I was going through was more than I could bare without writing about it. My mother did not value my writings and somehow it got lost or tossed in the trash. The memories were so painful to her that she did not want to be reminded, now all of those journal entries live in my mind.

Eastern Europe After the war, life in Budapest and the revolution...my father's time in Siberia, then as a political prisoner...so there were many many stories much pain for our family...but that is another story for another time...






Links to this story:

Anne Frank Museum

Rijksmuseum

Rick Steve's Tours