TRAVEL WITH THE IDEA THAT;
If you have no schedule, you aren't late. If you don't care where you are, you aren't lost. If you have no itinerary you're exactly where you ought to be.This page is brought to you with the help of Jim and Emmy at www.InvitationToTravel.com, Who website gives details of the books they have written about their travels in France, Germany and Italy, spending 605 nights in 406 different places in their RV in 25 countries in Europe.
France: Eight other countries (Andorra, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, Spain, and Switzerland) border on France, The glories of France include the Normandy beaches, the Brittany coast, the wonders of Paris, and the Châteaux on the Loire River. How about "Holiday on Ice", staged in a two-thousand-year-old Roman Amphitheater?
The City of Paris is exceptional, to say the least. Along with the buildings and monuments known to many tourists, each street and every neighborhood has its own charm. Antique markets, outdoor food markets, spacious and beautiful department stores, cathedrals, palaces, museums, monuments, and public buildings are rightfully world famous.
Honfleur is located on the south side of the Seine Estuary, across from
Le Havre. Honfleur¹s SteCatherine Quay, with its seven-story houses, is in splendid contrast to the two-story stone dwellings on the St.-Etienne Quay, just across the Old Dock. Even more contrast is the Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors ice cream store in an ancient building on the St.-Etienne Quay. A generation of impressionists have set their easels on this quay, and there are always artists with easel and palette, and photographers with a neck full of camera straps, attempting to capture the charm of this venerable city.
Shopping in Paris, France
If you never met a Marché Aux Puces (flea market) you didn¹t like, Paris is for you. At St. Ouen near Porte de Clignancourt, a patron can buy anything from junk to antiques in the many blocks of street sellers in this ungainly marketplace.
Germany: A trip to Germany can be a trip through many different settings, representing many periods of history. Scenery, architecture, and the ambiance of the towns and villages, all change from one section of the country to another.
Many of the great rivers of Europe flow through Germany, and combined with a network of canals they provide waterway channels for movement of ships, barges, and tourists from one part of the country to the other. The Donau (Danube), Elbe, Main, Mosel, Neckar, Oder, Rhein, Ruhr, Saar, and the Weser Rivers, among others, each play an important role in the commerce of the country. They also provide the tourist with points of interest, beautiful scenery, and a spectacular mode of travel.
A tourist who is able to travel throughout the US in a car or an RV, or by bus or train, will be able to travel around Germany just as easily.
Restaurants, hotels, points of interest and the route to the next destination are just as easy to find. The ability to communicate in German would be helpful, but with hand signals and a good German/English dictionary, the tourist will be able to find his way from place to place.
Italy: A trip to Italy is unlike any other trip imaginable. A beautiful, confounding, exciting, educational experience that will be remembered for a lifetime. Italy is cluttered with beautiful old towns and buildings, but more important, Italy is crowded with beautiful, friendly, congenial people.
Italy is mountainous to the extreme, with hundreds, if not thousands of tiny villages clambering the mountainsides, some reached on narrow twisty roads.
Just imagine walking the streets of Rome where Caesar walked; through Emperor Hadrian's "Villa Adriana" at Tivoli; among the excavated ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD; in and around the Greek Temples at Paestum, and at Agrigento, Sicily; up and down the steep streets in Urbino, the birthplace of Raphaël, artist and architect of St. Peter's Basilica; and to the edge of the huge quarries at Carrara, where the marble block Michelangelo used for his statue of David was found.
When boats and Italy are mentioned, you think of Venice. The city consists of 118 tiny islands separated by 150 canals, and connected by 400 bridges. Travel about the city is by motorboat, gondola, vaporetto (city ³bus²), or on foot. A first time Venetian visitor will board a vaporetto at Piazzale Roma, and be thrilled by this beautiful city as they proceeds the length of the Grand Canal, first passing under the Rialto Bridge, then the Accademia Bridge, finally to St. Mark¹s.
The gondolas are the most famous travel mode in Venice, and the most
expensive. Yes, sometimes gondoliers do in fact sing as they row with a single oar, but sometimes several gondolas will crowd together and a professional singer will serenade the whole group. While walking from here to there, sometimes the journey can be shortened by use of a gondola ferry, called ³traghetto,² which cross the Grand Canal at strategic points. The vaporettos go to many nearby islands, and up and down the Grand Canal stopping at specially built floating ³bus² stops, some on one side of the canal, some on the other.
Market boats deliver daily rations to homeowners along the canals. Instructions and negotiations are shouted, the goods (and change) are loaded into a basket and pulled upstairs. Sometimes a basket lowered from an upper-story window, is treated as a mail-box by the postman.
This page is brought to you with the help of Jim and Emmy at www.InvitationToTravel.com
For information on other locations as well as more information or to buy a book please visit their website
