Climbing into Winter on Day 6
Romania is a place of endless human stories, kings and autocrats and invaders and defenders and the people caught up in all of it. But the day after walking on a church’s rampart… Continue reading
Category Archive: tour guide
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Plimba Ursul! Or Better Yet, Plimba Peter, Day 4
Romanians curse a lot. My favorite of their more playful profanities is when they tell someone to go away. We might use two simple words to form an expression that makes very little… Continue reading
Personal and Continental Redemption on Day 3
The obvious highlight on Day 3 of our Tour of Romania is the opulent yet intimate royal palace of Peles. I’ve written about it before and there is much more to say, but… Continue reading
My Favorite Part of Day 1
I love to hear different languages overlapping in the summer air. In Bucharest on Day One of this year’s Romania tour, the languages were varied and the air was nice and toasty, like… Continue reading
Romania, Day by Day
Hello fellow travelers and curious minds. When I tell people I lead a small-group tour of Romania I am often met by blank looks. The honest will admit “I don’t know anything about… Continue reading
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
