Displaying items by tag: travel europe

The snow-capped Alps provided a striking background to the little town of Interlaken, allowing photographer Kelly Saunders to capture a glimpse into Swiss culture and culinary delights.

I must confess that I subscribe to some of those thick and glossy travel magazines. However, I don’t know why, because I’m never going to stay in any of the hotels they tout. Too expensive. And truth be told, I’d rather not stay in a hotel at all. Let me explain:

With such a fluid atmosphere of open-air cafes and meandering canals spotted with lazy mallards, the city of Amsterdam offers the backpacker a rare slice of history, and the chance to submerge into a culture where anything, and often everything goes. The Dutch push the aesthetic appeal of art and style into a realm of unabashed individualism, yet between each skirted beauty and scarf-wrapped gent there glides a constant and implacable social bond.

While traveling through southern Andalucia, on the road from Sevilla, the region's capital, to the village of Casariche (about 130 kilometers away), I was reminded of earlier rural travelers I had heard about, who had never reached their destinations. They were victims of Bandoleros: armed men who would rob those passing through the southern mountain range of Sierra Morenain the 18th and 19th centuries.

As one of the millions of people who have loved all of the books and television serials of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful and All Things Wise and Wonderful, I have been entranced by the Yorkshire Dales.  After recently visiting London, my husband and I took the M1 north to see for myself the place that I had been so inexorably drawn to.

With the dollar’s recent decline versus the Euro, there are few travel values left in Western Europe. For adventure travelers willing to go on their own, a self-guided bicycle tour of Sicily is still a bargain – and a wonderful adventure.

It's another humid daybreak in June in the city of Pula on the north-west coast of the Croatian Adriatic. The sun is about to rise above the silhouette of a city that only seems silent and sleepy. A motor ship is leaving the port, headed about 300 miles to the south. Its final destination: National Park Krka River, whose best-known natural landmark is Skradinski Buk.

When a place lends itself to the leisure of other people it generally becomes a haven for the lewd and the superficial. I am now in the fifteenth month of a backpacking journey that has taken me to some of the less contemporary parts of the world. In speaking with people and seeing their ways, I have found that culture is what makes a country endearing, and that a culture exploited is something lamentable. A place that panders to tourism is simply a place without a soul.

Just before a big trip happens I always get very nervous, as though my family and friends, house, cats, and job cannot survive without me.   Pre-flight, I’m like a man slowly marching to his execution ---  and he doesn’t get to say goodbye.   Dramatic and silly but nonetheless true, when it’s time to go, all I want to do is stay.  Until I actually leave. And then reality slaps me into remembering I don’t have to deal with my mother if I’m far away.

The Northern Lights are one of nature’s most fantastic light shows.  They appear as a whitish glow with flickering tints of green and red. They may make wavelike patterns or streak across the sky – a dance of lights.