To help us prepare for our first trip to Lisbon, Portugal, in July 2018, Simply Transfer & Tour (www.simplytransfer.pt [in Portuguese only]) came highly recommended by a friend of ours who had recently visited Lisbon.
Never wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, we made arrangements with the owner, Andre, for two full-day private tours plus airport transfers. We contacted him three weeks in advance of our trip, finalizing it a week ahead.
8-day, 7-night "intermediate"-level walking tour in southwestern FRANCE, May 8-15 & Sept. 29-Oct. 6, 2019. Highlights: From Carcassonne, drive to Montlaur/walk through Gorges du Congoust/picnic at Ribaute in Pyrénées/7th-century Abbaye Sainte-Marie de Lagrasse/climb 1,500-foot Pech de Blanes/Corbières wine region/Cathar village of Cucugnan/Hermitage of St. Anthony of Galamus/fortified Cathar castles Château de Montségur and Château de Foix. €2,500 (near $2,835) ppdo. Single supp., €600 ($681).
11 days, 10 nights, Aug. 22-Sept. 1, 2019. Highlights: In Warsaw, Ghetto Memorial, Poland Military Museum/in Lublin, Sobibór, Majdanek and Bełz˙ec concentration camps/in Kraków, 16th-century Flemish tapestries in Wawel Castle, Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory/in Cze˛stochowa, Black Madonna at Jasna Góra Monastery/sites of Chełmno and Treblinka extermination camps/Gdansk/ruins of "Wolf's Lair" at Ke˛trzyn. $3,500 ppdo. Single supp., $800. Valor Tours (Sausalito, CA; 800/842-4504, www.valortours.com).
“The monument blends the area's raging winds with an amazing view of distant, glacier-topped peaks and a glacial lake.” This is how the contributor of November's mystery photo described the spot where she captured this sculpture on film.
The 322-foot-tall statue pictured in our October 2018 mystery photo has an interesting history. Erected in 1997 in central Moscow, Russia, on a man-made island at the western confluence of the Moskva River and the Vodootvodny Canal, the statue commemorates 300 years of the Russian Navy, which was formed by Peter the Great in 1696.
