After a rigorous winter in January and February 2015, with record snowfall and cold in Massachusetts, we decided that a visit to the tropics looked good, so we booked a week’s trip on the Paul Gauguin, sailing on March 28 from Tahiti to other islands in French Polynesia.
A 1½-hour guided tour of Heidelberg University, Germany’s oldest university (founded in 1386), is offered by Heidelberg Marketing (phone +49 6221 58 44 444, www.heidelberg-marketing.de/en). Sites visited include the Library, the Peterskirche and the Karzer, a prison for students.
Visitors to Stockholm, Sweden, can take a rooftop tour with Takvandring (Stora Gråmunkegra˘nd 12-14, 111 28 Stockholm, Sweden; phone +46 08 22 30 05, www.takvandring.com). The one-hour, 15-minute tour takes climbers along the roofs of Stockholm 142 feet above the streets, across catwalks and up ladders, led by an English-speaking guide.
A rooftop tour costs SEK595 (near $70) and must be booked online in advance. Safety gear is provided. Persons weighing over 264 pounds or with a history of heart disease will not be allowed, and those with a fear of heights should not participate.
In northern Italy, the 7-hour, small-group tour “Land of Motors” begins in Bologna and stops first at the Ducati Museum and factory (ducati.com), where the history of Ducati motorcycle racing (1946 to the present) is on display. The group then visits the Lamborghini factory (www.
lamborghini.com), the Ferrari Museum (http://museomaranello.ferrari.com), next to Ferrari’s test track, and the Ferrari factory.
Completed in 1850 in southwestern Ireland, Ballycotton Island Lighthouse is now open to visitors for the first time.
Lighthouse tours run by Ballycotton Island Lighthouse Tours (Ballycotton, Ireland; phone +351 21 4646875, www.balleycottonlighthousetours.com) depart daily at 10 a.m. onward from the Inn By The Harbour, a pub located at the pier in the village of Ballycotton, about 25 miles east of Cork.
Visitors to the 138-year-old Glasgow Central Station (Gordon St., Glasgow, Scotland, G1 3SL, U.K.; phone +44 845 748 4950) can take a behind-the-scenes tour of the second-busiest train station in the UK.
The 90-minute tour (weather permitting) includes a 90-step climb and a walk across catwalks above the roof, made up of 48,000 panes of glass, plus a trip to the remains of Grahamston village, which the station was built on top of in 1879, a stop at the old steam engine boiler rooms and an exploration of the station’s catacombs.
I spent five super-great weeks in the UK, mostly in Scotland, in late summer of 2013. Two of those weeks were spent doing tours with Explore! (Nelson House, 55-59 Victoria Rd., Farnborough, Hampshire, GU14 7PA, U.K.; phone 0843 634 5157, www.explore.co.uk). one in Orkney and one in Hebrides and Skye.
I flew into Scotland on July 29 and around Aug. 4 joined the tour “Discover Orkney,” priced at £699 (near $1,093). It ended around Aug. 10. There wasn’t much walking on that one.
My husband and I had booked a cruise on Holland America Line’s Prinsendam, which had a port call in Fowey, Cornwall, England, on July 24, 2014. We’re great fans of the PBS British comedy “Doc Martin” and wanted to see the town of Port Isaac, where it’s filmed. In February, I decided to contact Dacey’s Cornish Tours (St. Paul, MN; 651/484-4689,
daceyscornishtours.com), an advertiser in ITN, to see if they would have suggestions on how to get there.
Uisge Beatha, Gaelic for “water of life,” is known around the world as Scotch whisky. When my wife, Margaret, and I traveled in Scotland in June 2014 (Nov. ’14, pg. 20), we knew we had to learn more about the national beverage.
There are more than 100 distilleries in Scotland, and more than 30 of those offer tours. We toured four distilleries and learned a great deal about making and tasting whisky.
Before joining a Douro River cruise in Portugal in June 2014, my husband and I booked a small-group day trip from Lisbon to Sintra and Cascais at $70 per person. We booked it through Viator (San Francisco, CA; 866/648-5873, www.viator.com).