Looking across the Danube through sheets of rain at the creamy façade and dark dome of Budapest’s Parliament, I shake my head in amazement. I did not expect to be in Budapest this week, sitting before my room’s picture window in the Castle Hilton, a … Read more
I’m writing on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving while gazing directly at a ridge of snow-covered Alps. The sun is setting in a blaze of white-and-black glory here in Interlaken, Switzerland, the site from which the Holiday Market Tour begins, my last Smithsonian Journey of the … Read more
This week has flown. It seems just yesterday that I asked Hank to search out art for last week’s essay about the possible demise of the key. (As usually, he found terrific paintings, do you agree?) So here I am in Amsterdam, hours away from … Read more
This weekly essay inevitably reflects whatever is on my mind (for better or worse). Right now, my mind resembles the state of a kitchen drawer containing everything from toothpicks to the tape measurer. Trapped in layers of mental miscellany, my ability to put together coherent … Read more
It was good to get home Sunday evening. Remember what that pigtailed gal with the doggie said to Auntie Em? “There’s no place like home!” Of course there are always places more majestic than home. More intriguing, more evocative. We saw plenty of them on … Read more
I have stayed in a lot of hotels over the past decade. My work on Smithsonian Journeys tours takes me through a string of European cities for weeks at a time. Also, my role speaking as “Professor Carol” puts me in a multiplicity of US … Read more
“We are fighters,” proclaimed our travel director Halina during her fascinating narrative as we rode through the gorgeous countryside from Warsaw to Krakow. The same sentence had resounded the previous day from our young city guide Carolina as she toured us through Warsaw. And then … Read more
The whirlwind starts Friday when I fly off for my first tour of the fall. On Sunday evening in Warsaw, I will meet the twenty-one people who chose this Smithsonian Journey’s tour with its innocuous name “Old World Europe.” The next morning we’ll launch into … Read more
Departure Day of a tour never gets portrayed properly in the brochures. For many in each group, it starts with a brutally early hotel pickup for travel to the airport. No one likes it, of course, but if the goal is to connect to a … Read more
A wild storm is brewing outside my window here on Leipziger Strasse in Berlin. It might be a relief for Berliners after such an unseasonably hot day. Regardless of how much Germans yearn for hot summers, the reality of such temperatures does seem to cause … Read more
