The guidebook “Pub Interiors of Special Historic Interest” helps visitors to London seek out the city’s best time-capsule pubs. Only 133 make it onto the Campaign for Real Ale’s (CAMRA) regional inventory for their important historic interiors. The 48-page guide, with photographs, costs £3.50. Visit www.camra.org.uk.
Hampton Court Palace, the former home of King Henry VIII, has a new permanent gardens exhibition. Situated off the East Front Gardens, it shows how the palace gardens evolved from the early 16th century up to the present day.
On Saturdays and Sundays through Sept. 26, 2004, costumed interpreters dressed as courtiers in the days when William III and Mary II were in residence will lead 30-minute tours of the East and South Front gardens.
Contact Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey, KT8 9AV, England; phone +44 (0) 870 752 7777.
I took a group of my college students on the 9-day/7-night “Braveheart” tour of Scotland with Passports Educational Travel Institute (389 Main St., Spencer, MA 01562-1908; phone 508/885-4600), visiting Edinburgh, the Highlands and Glasgow. The $2,300 price (May ’04) included airfare on USAir from Denver, 3-star hotel accommodations, daily breakfast and dinner, transfers, tour and admission fees and travel insurance.
One of the High Tech Hotels group, the Petit Palace Bristol (L’Abadia de San Martin 3, 47002 Valencia, SPAIN; phone + 34 963 945 100, fax +34 963 943 850 or e-mail bri@hthoteles.com) offers free high-speed Internet access in all rooms. Plus, if a High Tech Room is requested, it comes complete with a PC with a 15-inch flat-screen monitor. There also is a business center, not to mention two flat-screen PCs in the lobby for use.
Because of its curious location, Maastricht makes an ideal homebase for those who want to see something of this area of the Netherlands, as we found on our trip to Europe in 2000. We visited a specially placed stone monument that marks the spot where three countries meet: the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Most everyone walks around this marker so they can claim to have visited three countries in under 10 seconds! Never one to miss a unique experience, I did it — amusing even in the rain.
KATHRYN LEMMON
Unionville, IN
Those of us who have visited the restored Catherine Palace outside of St. Petersburg in Russia have seen the photos of the destruction caused during the World War II “900-day” (actually “only” 872-day) siege of the city then called Leningrad.
When we were in Paris for a week in early April ’04, we wanted to tour the D-Day battlefields in one day. We were staying at the Marriott on the Champs-Élysées, and tours from the hotel would be expensive, so I went online before we left and found Battlebus Tours under a “D-Day” search.
Both my wife, JoAnn, and I are World War II history buffs, primarily because family members were in uniform during that period. Beside the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, probably the best known and most ferocious battle was the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg and Belgium.
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