Even though my wife and I are experienced independent travelers, we fully expected to join a group tour for our first visit to Israel in April ’12. But when it came time to select one, we found that most tours were oriented toward a particular religious denomination or had a specific, dominating agenda. We wanted a nondenominational tour that focused on history rather than doctrine.
by Louise Bickman, Boulder, CO
by Nita & Charles Swartz; Las Cruces, NM
The home of a 19th-century cartoonist and his family has reopened in London after a 3-year renovation. A middle-class townhouse of the period, Linley Sambourne House was the home of the Punch magazine illustrator Edward Linley Sambourne from 1875.
The home is crammed full of period artifacts, including porcelain, etchings and statuettes. Visitors are taken around the house by a costumed actor who plays the part of Mrs. Sambourne, their son or the domestic maid.
by Bill Altaffer; San Diego, CA
By Fred DeVinney. Photos by Jean DeVinney
Oakland, CA
by Diane Harrison, Creve Coeur, MO
Using Globetrotter Guides’ “Turkey Travel Guide” to compare the itineraries offered by several large tour companies, my parents and I started planning our 2010 vacation. We decided on smarTours’ 14-day “Treasures of Turkey.”
By Nili Olay; New York, NY
Madagascar, the land of lemurs and baobab trees, wasn’t even on our short list of places to visit. Furthermore, we don’t like group tours. Yet my husband, Jerry, and I traveled to Madagascar as part of a group of 10 from May 16 to June 9, 2010. Why?
My husband, Rodney, and I took the “Imperial Russian Waterways” tour with Vantage Deluxe World Travel, Aug. 5-26, 2008, which included a 3-night Kiev pretrip and a 3-night Stockholm post-trip extension for a total of 22 days.
This was not only our first riverboat trip, it was our first experience in being with a group larger than 20 people. We approached it as an experiment, to see whether our avoidance of large groups was really justified.
I felt the letter titled “Tour Members’ Encounters Distorted?” (Jan. ’09, pg. 26) presented an unusually negative characterization of a tour experience in Southern Africa with Overseas Adventure Travel (Cambridge, MA; 800/493-6824, www.oattravel.com).
My wife and I traveled independently to many of the world’s countries, and, following her untimely death, I decided to take group tours since I didn’t want to eat by myself. Subsequently, I have taken 17 overseas group tours with different companies.