Hi from Rick: My Dream Season
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| After a long day of guidebook-updating, restaurant research is my reward. |
Dear Traveler,
It's travel dream season, and I'm in the thick of it this week as I pack for my annual spring guidebook and tour research trip. Each year I spend April and May in the Mediterranean, fly back home for June, then spend July and August north of the Alps. I like to slice my European projects into three-week chunks. Apart from that structure, every day is an adventure.
About the time you read this, I'll hit the ground running in Granada, spending three weeks in the south of Spain and in Basque country. It'll be Easter season, and no place in Europe celebrates Easter with the color and liveliness of Spain.
Then, I'll immerse myself in Italy for three weeks. I call it work, but just between you and me, researching all the best restaurants each night, from Rome across Umbria and Tuscany for a Florentine finale, is pure fun...one of the delights of my year.
After Italy, I'll meet my film crew in Slovenia, and over the next three weeks we'll film three TV shows covering Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro. This fast-changing region will remind me — and our viewers — how Europe never gets stale. In fact, it stays so fresh that, no matter where I find myself, I forever feel like a frisky beginner.
While I’m on the road, one of my top researchers will be spending two weeks in Europe with the sole purpose of road-testing and improving our phrase books. If you've used our phrase books, we'd like to hear from you about what works…and what doesn’t. Please make your suggestions by the end of April on our Graffiti Wall under Hot Topics.
I just spent an evening with my wife, Anne, and her merry gang of traveling buddies. Still buzzing about the fun they had on their Venice-Florence-Rome tour, they've had fun choosing their 2009 adventure — one of our Best of Spain & Portugal tours departing in October (France was a close runner-up, but Spain is a perfect fit for this gang).
This month's Travel News is designed to nudge you into your own dream season, with articles on what's new in Europe for 2009, my favorite light-packing tips (coinciding with our spring carry-on bag sale), and a dizzying assortment of money-saving summer tour destinations.
It's dream time. We'd love to take you to wherever yours are calling.
Happy travels,
Rick Steves