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Rick Steves added an event.
Rick Steves is flying dozens of European tour guides to Edmonds, WA for his biggest event of the year — and you're invited!
Learn all about Europe's best destinations and itineraries for 2018 at Test Drive a Tour Guide, a daylong event filled with 21 information-packed presentations. All classes are free, but registration is required: www.ricksteves.com/testdrive.
Happy travels!
Rick Steves shared Rick Steves' Europe Tours's video.
Siena — Italy's best medieval city experience — is just 35 miles south of Florence. With red-brick lanes tumbling every which way, pedestrians rule and the present feels like the past.
In this clip from Rick Steves’ Europe, we visit the town’s 13th-century cathedral. The white and dark-green striped church is as over-the-top as Gothic gets. It’s slathered with colorful art, from inlaid-marble floors to stained-glass windows. Inside, you’ll find the work of the greatest sculptors of every era: Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Bernini.
Day 12 of the Best of Italy in 17 Days Tour brings us to Siena — a "living museum" brimming with some of Italy's finest Gothic architecture.
In this four-minut...e clip from Rick Steves’ Europe, Rick takes you to the town’s elaborate cathedral. Want to experience it for yourself? Let’s go: www.ricksteves.com/tours/italy/best-italy
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It’s winter — my favorite time for travel dreaming!
If you’re still deciding on your next destination, here’s a tip: Find a great local festival and build your trip around that. Festivals are filled with rich tradition, great food, and lots of fun with the locals.
While it can be hard to get tickets for some festivals, most are widely accessible. For the Highland Games, Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls, Bastille Day in Paris, or Munich’s Oktoberfest, your biggest challenge i...s booking a hotel room well in advance.
I take you along to all of my favorite festivals in my new Rick Steves' European Festivals book, available now at www.ricksteves.com/festivals-book. (And once you have your destination pinned down, be sure to grab a 2018 guidebook at www.ricksteves.com/guidebooks.)
Happy travels!
My co-author Cameron Hewitt has put together an insightful and inspiring list of his 10 favorite off-the-beaten-path discoveries in Europe — from a steaming field in Iceland, to a glorious little corner of the Alps, to hipster hangouts in Budapest and Athens, to the most enchanting slice of rural Tuscany. I love the way Cameron combines an intriguing sense of place, vivid photography, and practical tips. Let this list stoke your travel dreams for 2018: https://blog.ricksteves.com/…/10-european-discoveries-for-2…
Feeling inspired by Cameron's top ten? I'd love to hear about your favorite underappreciated corner of Europe.
High in Switzerland’s Appenzell: www.ricksteves.com/…/articles/high-in-switzerlands-appenzell
Photo: Cameron Hewitt
For me, a fun part of any visit to Copenhagen is dropping in on the alternative community of Christiania.
In 1971, several hundred squatters attempted to create their own utopia at an abandoned military barracks, just a 10-minute walk from the Danish parliament building. Two generations later, those idealists are still there, defending their right to enjoy life on their terms. And their “free city” — an ultra-human mishmash of idealists, hippies, potheads, non-materialists, and happy children — still stands.
The team behind the documentary Christiania - 40 Years of Occupation joins me this week on my radio show and podcast. Listen to our conversation now at www.ricksteves.com/radio.
Christmas in some European countries kicks off 12 more days of religious observance — the famous Twelve Days of Christmas. They end today (January 6) with the Epiphany holiday, when the Three Wise Men were said to have finally brought their gifts to the baby Jesus.
France, not surprisingly, celebrates Epiphany in an edible way. For several days from Christmas until the Feast of Epiphany, the French line up at bakeries to buy the “galette des rois”— the “Cake of Kings.” They b...ring these to dinner parties and enjoy them as snacks and with mid-afternoon tea. The tradition of the treats dates back to the 14th century.
What’s the reason for this enormous amount of pastry consumption? (Although honestly, who needs a reason to eat pastry?) Inside each galette hides a tiny trinket, usually made of porcelain. While these once had religious significance, today they range from miniature paintings of Picasso’s “Guernica” or Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa to figurines of Zorro or even Harry Potter. The trinkets hidden inside each galette are called “fèves,” named for the fava beans that were the original prizes. Today, fèves are highly collectible.
Traditionally, the cake is cut while the youngest child at the table designates who will get each piece (so there’s no cheating). Everyone takes careful bites of the pastry until someone finds the fève. The excited winner gets the fève, as well as a golden paper or plastic crown that tops the cake — and becomes king or queen for the day.
In Italy, Epiphany is the time of “La Befana,” the legendary Good Witch of Christmas, who gives gifts to children. You can read about La Befana at https://www.ricksteves.com/…/epiphany-in-europe-sweetness-t…
All hands on deck! Are you ready to kick off a fresh new year of rewarding travels? At www.ricksteves.com/news, you'll find articles on spectacular rail journeys and Italy's bicultural Bolzano, Cameron Hewitt's top 10 European discoveries for 2018, and a trio of features on France: my video on the Loire Valley, a 12-minute audio clip filled with Versailles Palace sightseeing tips, and a bubbly forum discussion on how (or why) one might BYO Champagne to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Happy Travels in 2018!
Rick Steves shared Rick Steves' Europe Tours's video.
Enjoying life with abandon comes easy in the south of Spain.
In Sevilla’s Barrio Santa Cruz, the streets are too narrow for cars (some are called “kissing lanes” because the buildings are so close) — but the tangled web of alleys is perfect for meandering among small plazas, tile-covered patios, and whitewashed houses draped in flowers.
Getting lost here is easy, and I recommend doing just that.
Thinking about Spain — and want to decide your own daily sightseeing priorities and pace? Check out a Rick Steves My Way vacation package: www.ricksteves.com/to...urs/spain-portugal/my-way-spain
(How about an afternoon of window-shopping along the narrow, whitewashed lanes of Sevilla's Barrio Santa Cruz?)
Westminster — Day 2 of the Best of London in 7 Days Tour: www.ricksteves.com/tours/england-scotland/london
Photo: Dominic Arizona Bonuccelli Photography for Rick Steves' Europe Tours
Some people clean house to start the New Year. I clean up old folders of photographs, taken over the years, that document my travels. Last night, doing just that, I got swallowed up in an amazing decade of trip memories — natural wonders, taste treats, artistic eurekas, faraway friends, and inspirations. I pondered what an integral part of my life these travel experiences are. I suppose other people — like an avid painter, a football star, or a beloved pastor — have similarly... powerful life stories contributing to the weave of who they are. For me, it’s travel.
The tapestry of my life is made strong and colorful by the rich rewards of travel: The hikes — cut-glass peaks shouting their glory to the heavens; the taste treats — dipping the eagerly ripped bits of baguette into the garlic sauce for my “snail chaser”; the artistic triumphs — swizzled into a gravity-defying Russian/Jewish/child-of-God/French cocktail of life in a gallery full of Marc Chagall murals; the new friends — like my private whisky coach in the Edinburgh pub, who spent an entire evening showing me how a wee dram can be a very good friend; and the lessons learned — like how our world is filled with joy, love, and people...beautiful both inside and out, and eager to meet us.
If you traveled with Rick Steves’ Europe in any way in 2017, thanks so much. If you are blessed with the opportunity to travel in 2018, I hope we can be of some help. In so many ways, we’re all in this together...and I think that’ll be my theme in the New Year.
Best wishes, and Happy Travels in 2018!
Rick Steves shared Rick Steves' Europe Tours's video.
Art is the closest thing to a time-tunnel experience in our travels. In this clip from Rick Steves’ Europe, we enjoy an intimate peek at life in Venice 500 years ago.
Sample the sumptuous art treasures at Venice’s Accademia Gallery in this clip from Rick Steves’ Europe — and then experience it all yourself on a Rick Steves tour: www.ricksteves.com/tours/italy/venice-florence-rome
Cheers, santé, salud, prost, skål!
This week on my radio show and podcast, we're toasting the new year with Chris Santella, the author of "50 Places to Drink Beer Before You Die." Listen in at www.ricksteves.com/radio as he tells us the best places around the globe to raise a pint.
What are your favorite destinations for great beer?
I get very frustrated when I hear people call climate change a “theory.” From a European perspective, humans are causing the planet to warm up — which will likely lead to devastating hardship and suffering for future generations…most severely in the poor world. Those who deny that fact are either very greedy or very stupid.
In my travels, I see signs of our changing climate everywhere. In England's Portsmouth, floodgates are being built on medieval streets that never needed ...them before. In Hamburg, you’ll find all-new riverside construction basically on stilts, in anticipation of storm surges that could push the Elbe River into people’s living rooms. The Dutch — famously smart, famously frugal, and famously below sea level — are spending billions of euros shoring up their dikes and preparing for a rising sea (pictured here). Rotterdam has a new storm surge barrier, the size of two horizontal Eiffel Towers on wheels, that can roll together when high seas threaten. And the Swiss (who don’t build ski lifts these days without plumbing them to make snow) remember summer skiing in the Alps as something their parents did.
In my personal world, the Iditarod dog race in Alaska that my sister participates in has become an annual rocky slog — even with a course that has been relocated to find some snow. And my family’s cabin retreat in Washington’s Cascade Mountains is threatened by persistent forest fires.
What about you? Have you witnessed the effects of climate change during your travels? Please post your observations here, and we'll use them to create a "travelers' list" of signs of climate change around the globe that we can all share the next time a denier calls it “just a theory."
(Of course, inspiring so many people to cross the Atlantic makes me a huge contributor to climate change. This is something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and I’m still working to find a clear and effective way to make our company carbon-neutral. I’d love to hear if you've found a good way to balance the negative impact flying has on the environment.)
Rick Steves added 11 new photos to the album: Audio Europe App in Action.
Heading to Europe? Be sure to download the Rick Steves Audio Europe app for free access to my vast library of self-guided walking tours and radio interviews: www.ricksteves.com/audioeurope.
I love seeing photos of you using the app on the ground in Europe. Got a photo to share? Please send it my way in a Facebook message, and I’ll post the best here.
I’ve just completed a 40-year study of “Ugly Americans” in Europe. I’ve concluded two things: If you’re being treated like an Ugly American, it’s because you are one; and (thankfully) Ugly Americans are much rarer now than they used to be.
Ugly Americans are not bad people — just ethnocentric. And, being ethnocentric gets you into a vicious downward cycle in your travels: You complain when things aren’t what you think of as proper, so you see fewer smiles and worse service, ...and you complain even more. You end up going home in a bad mood.
Of course, with an ethnocentric, “me first” president who sees the world as a zero-sum game (and is scaling up the “lawyers, insults, and intimidation” approach he uses in his personal life into America’s approach to the family of nations), Americans dreaming of a European vacation might wonder if we’re not all going to be treated as Ugly. Happily, the answer is no. While Europeans are sad to see our suddenly less-gracious country no longer a moral leader and an inspiration around the globe, they still welcome us as individuals. (But if you have a MAGA hat, I’d recommend leaving it — and the attitude it symbolizes — home if you want to enjoy the same warm welcome other Americans receive.)
For those of you that want to be seen not as an Ugly American, but as a beautiful one, here are a few things to think about before your next trip: www.ricksteves.com/…/articles/the-ugly-tourist-and-how-not-…
