The journey comes to an end with a BIG travel day! They say that "all good things must come to an end" and so our journey takes one last leap across the Atlantic from London to Los Angeles and home to Camarillo. Remember that the major framework of this vacation came from redeeming miles earned mostly on United Airlines and honored by United's Star Alliance mileage partners. 1,000,000 earned air miles redeemed for two business class around-the-world tickets brought us to this point in the journey. Since redeemed air miles are still based on availability, we had to route on [View Full Entry]

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London ala carte! A day on our own. We got up early and headed down the street to the "Muffin Man" for an English breakfast that was very good before taking a taxi to Buckingham Palace for the "changing of the guard". Security was evident everywhere, as you can expect, and the crowds were big. We did our best to take pictures and film the action. The sound was fantastic. We came away with a sense of accomplishment and pride that we choose not to change our tour plans in London given the recent events - that would be just [View Full Entry]

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Travel Day - Paris to London via Eurostar high speed train through the Chunnel We said goodbye to Paris, France and hello to London, England by way of the Eurostar train. Had an (interesting?) meal - don't ask - and some great French wine to see us through. At the highest speed we were moving nearly 180 kph (about 110 mph), pretty fast for a train. We gained (or lost depending on your point of view!) another hour moving from Paris to London. The UK Eurostar was the first train we have traveled on that screened all of our baggage. [View Full Entry]

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Highlights of Paris; The Louvre, The Eiffel Tower, The Arch of Triumph and the Cathedral of Notre Dame We headed out on foot from our hotel down the street about 3 blocks and then crossed over into the square surrounded by the The Louvre. As you know, the Louvre is huge and we have already had first hand experience with ancient Roman, Eqyptian and Chinese historical artifacts so we set our priorities to the following four world class art objects; the Mona Lisa, Napolean & Josephine Coronation, Winged Victory and the Venus de Milo. Searching for these four items within [View Full Entry]

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Normandy - site of Operation Overlord - June 6, 1944; The Longest Day, The Day of Days Up early and on the bus again this time for transit from Paris to the Normandy coast along the English Channel and to visit the landing beaches of D-Day. In Normandy, above Omaha Beach, is the site of thousands of US graves. The site of the US Memorial has been returned to the US and is US ground, not French ground. The Memorial is a powerful reminder of that era. The site is the second burial ground for many of those who died [View Full Entry]

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We are back online, out of Italy, in Paris and most importantly, Ginny is doing great! Here is the summary: we traveled from Rome to Florence (7/6) where Ginny came down with a sore throat and temperature. We camped out at the hotel and were not able to see Florence, guess we will have to go back!. We were pressed by schedule to move onto Venice via Eurostar speed train (7/7) where we were able to spend two nights, cancelled our tour and made time for Ginny to rest. We called a Doctor (7/8) who arrived by boat to our [View Full Entry]

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We slept in per plan (and need!) until 9am then headed downstairs for breakfast. We returned to the room to process the outstanding blogs for 7/3 and 7/4 which gave us time to relax some more and think about the plans ahead; the rest of today, tomorrow's train travel to Florence around 2pm and an afternoon transfer to Venice the day after. We are officially global road warriors! There may be those who fly more often and to more places, but we have earned a spot on the "A" list for international travel. As a team, we are VERY good. [View Full Entry]

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Up for breakfast at the hotel and a taxi ride to the train station where we caught our train to Naples. We met our driver in Naples as planned. Funny story here...our driver was talking to another driver while holding the sign with our name on it. In true Italian form, the driver was "talking with his hands" so expressively, that we weren't sure if it was our name or not because it was flying all around. A good laugh and introductions then off to the Mercedes Benz van to Pompeii to hook up with Stefano, our guide for the [View Full Entry]

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We headed out from our hotel to get a measure of the city and do some exploring on our own before we hooked up with our driver to take us to Tivoli to visit the Roman Villas D'Este where the Tivoli Gardens re and Villa Adriana. We struck out walking and headed for Barberini Square. Along the way we got our second look at traffic in Rome, basically insane. In the course of 6-8 blocks we saw hundreds if not a thousand scooters...the overwhelming choice of transporation in Rome. Of the 60 million Italians, some 4+ million live and work [View Full Entry]

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Journey from Egypt to Italy via Austria We experienced a beautiful sunset over Cairo, went to sleep and got up for our journey to Austria. We exchanged gifts with Hamdy at the airport and moved on to our Austrian Airlines (a United Airlines Star Alliance partner) where we had business class seats out of Africa to Italy. Due to flight availability and scheduling we needed to link through Vienna where we overnighted at the airport (a NH Hotel, like a Novatel hotel) then back into the airport for our flight to Rome. Funny story here...we landed in Vienna and behaving [View Full Entry]

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