jillybeansan

We spent about a week in Peru and fell in love with this beautiful country of contrasts -- from the desertic coastal city of Lima to the highlands of Cusco to the lush greenery and mountains of Machu Picchu. Of course, there is much more to see of Peru, and we hope to discover it someday. We started and ended our tour of Peru in Lima, known as the City of Kings, and the capital of Spanish-ruled South America from the mid 1500's to the early 1800's. While we were there, we had a walking tour of downtown and also toured some pre-Incan ruins, like Pachacamac. We next flew to Cusco, a city of about 300,000 in southeastern Peru near the Urubamba Valley (Sacred Valley) of the Andes mountains. Cusco is at around 11,500 feet in ... read more

A few days in Amsterdam and a few days in Barcelona and our time in Europe is up! We arrived in Europe on March 5 and are leaving it nearly 3 months later -- we almost feel like natives! We will miss it, but not the prices, that's for sure. Amsterdam was quite the experience. Our hotel was about one block from the Red Light District and walking the streets are many colorful characters. We didn't do much walking around in the evenings, although Ted and Ty did venture into a "coffeeshop" to see what all the fuss was about. One visit was enough! We did a half day trip out to the Dutch countryside to a town called Zaanse Schans where there used to be 1,000 working windmills that took care of all the area's ... read more

After we left Italy, we did a self-drive tour for 6 days that took us through Weggis, Switzerland; Beaune, France; and both Baden, Baden and Frankfurt, Germany. Unfortunately, we have very few pictures from those days because our luck finally ran out and we encountered a LOT of rain that week. The scenery through the Alps in Switzerland was magnificent, even if the clouds were swirling all around us - it reminded us of Colorado, of course! We had one sunny day in Beaune which fortunately for us was a day we were scheduled for a 4 ½ mile hike with our guide, Geoff, through the countryside at the end of which we had a wonderful lunch in a small village restaurant. We walked past dozens of vineyards and Geoff gave us a remedial lesson on ... read more

I am struggling with how to describe the last 11 days. It’s not that long a time period, but we have seen and done so much. The eastern Euopean cities we have visited have been beautiful and so historic and our heads are truly swimming with information from the monarchies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the atrocities of the Nazis in WWI to the years of the Iron Curtain and Soviet bloc to the economies and cultures of these countries following the political changes in 1989. We started in Prague, the “City of One Hundred Spires,” where our education on eastern European history began with our guide, Yiri. We toured Old Town, the Municipal House and the Jewish Quarter before crossing the Charles Bridge to visit the Castle District, the seat of Bohemian kings and Holy ... read more

Our tour of Normandy took us on a journey through history from the cathedrals of medieval times to the Battle of Hastings with William the Conqueror to the Hundred Years War between France and England to the Battle of Normandy in WWII. We had requested a tour of the beaches of Normandy, but we got so much more, due in most part to the patient explanations of our tour guide, David, who is from the city of Bayeux,in Normandy. We began our tour at the Cathedral of Chartres, widely considered to be the finest gothic cathedral in France. Even though the weather was cold and drizzly, as it was throughout all of our tour of Normandy, we were still able to appreciate the 152 beautiful stained glass windows of the cathedral. Next we drove to the ... read more