Students Exploring Europe

The students have three-day long weekends for travel and have visited about a half-dozen countries that Barb has mentioned to me : Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands so far. There were a few minor misadventures along the way: One group went to the wrong airport for their flight from London and had to try…

“You can’t eat scenery” & the value of a guide

In Ireland it is the custom for tour guides to actually drive the bus as well as tell the tourists what they are seeing. Kevin Clancy, our guide, seemed cheerful and competent, while driving a big bus on narrow single track roads or in heavy traffic, but he mostly talked about practical things. He opened…

Western Ireland’s Tragic Beauty

The first group trip of the new year. If we going to Ireland, why not just go to Dublin ? It is after all, a quick cheap flight with lots to do? Dublin to Galway or Killanarny to Galway is about the same time by coach, so why the devil would we skip Dublin? Exactly…

Cruising the Thames from The Tower of London to The Cutty Sark

A month ago, we took a day out to celebrate my survival of another year. This year's birthday plan was to tour something in London that's older than I am.   As the local Amish say "We get too soon old, and too late wise". Since London is a port city on the Thames and…

Kew Gardens and Wimbledon

So how do you make a tour of famous tourist attractions miserable enough to justify giving the students academic credit for attending? Easy; just schedule it for November . The weather in  London is just about as horrid as advertised; and it has interfered with two business tours that we were quite looking forward to. I…

Coastal France: Bayeux & Mont Saint-Michel

Since I already complained about driving with my schoolboy French in my post about the Ferry , I will skip all that and start with Saint Malo where we spent the first day of our break. This is a lovely thousand-year old stone walled port town with long sandy beaches in Brittany, France  just across the…

Prague Life After Communism

  Prague's golden age was almost a thousand years ago when it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Under the Prague castle there are bricks that date back to 885 AD, and when Charles IV became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1350 AD  the humble little city became the third largest in…

The Morris Mini Tour

Thousands of Giant Robots Outside Oxford That isn't the title of an old sci-fi film, but it is the thing I will remember after suiting up in a spark proof overcoat to tour the Morris Mini plant in the Cowley area of Oxford, UK. The first car  made here was a two-seater Morris Oxford in 1913, assembled on a stationary production…