Category Archive: tour guide

Getting Ready for Spain

Like a preview for the movie I’m about to watch, the table in front of me tonight was four Spaniards. It’s been an inexplicable 13 years since I was in their country, but… Continue reading

The Guides of Tskaltubo

Memory was fading from Tskaltubo’s long hallways and grand rooms, trapped echoes of grand aspirations from the other side of a political fight but the same side of our human struggle to find… Continue reading

How Do We Travel in an Age of Travelers?

How do you take a group of people to see the Sistine Chapel? A guided tour of the Vatican Museums is a rugby match between 50 teams at once, played out in beautiful… Continue reading

What Covid did to Travel: the Good, the Bad, and the Better

English teachers call it a “feedback sandwich.” A discouraged learner might disengage, so you wrap the hard part between two tastier layers. At the end of the first tourism year after two rough… Continue reading

European spring 2022

The night before my first tour of Europe after two years of covid-enforced sabbatical, I wrote a post about the energy filling my mind and rattling through my body. But then I took… Continue reading

Click here first!

Romania was one big question mark when I first went, but after a couple months exploring the country, a clear chain of top notch attractions populated my mental map. Add in an incomparable… Continue reading

All I want for Christmas is a sneak preview of the itinerary…

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! I’ve been revamping the Romania tour for better covid safety, and in preparation to a formal launch on the affiliated website, and would like to share a preview of… Continue reading

Should we still travel during Covid? How?

One can’t help but wonder if the age of big bus tours is over. Fifty eight people packed into a coach, going together to the postcard sites and commission-paying shops for two weeks?… Continue reading

13 Day Tour of Romania, Europe’s Best Kept Secret

I see a fair amount of “Romania? I’ve never really considered Romania before” in people’s eyes when I mention the country. Posts illuminating my love for this underestimated land can be found here,… Continue reading

Walking through the past and present, in Bucovina’s Village Museum

When I stumbled on an unexpected open-air museum in Bucovina, Romania, the clear thing to do was say “one ticket, varog (please).” That done, I stepped through the turnstile and into the 1800s.… Continue reading