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Donate, Get Cool Gifts, Make a Difference for Christmas

If times seem tough for our friends and family now, imagine how tough they are for hungry and poor people. To inject a little extra meaning into the holiday season, each Christmas I put on a fundraiser to help Bread for the World. This year the needs and rewards are particularly great. I’d love to send you a special Christmas gift package in thanks for your gift to empower Bread’s work.

Bread for the World is a non-profit, non-partisan organization working in Washington, DC to urge our government to address the needs of hungry people at home and around the world. Especially today, when there are so many interests elbowing for attention on Capitol Hill, hungry and poor people need a strong, compassionate advocate like Bread.

While all the great charitable work we do as caring citizens is important, it’s interesting to realize that just a 6 percent drop in funding of government programs for hungry and poor people amounts to as much money taken from these causes as all the private donations put together raise. That means that the advocacy work of Bread for the World has a huge impact on the most vulnerable among us. Considering the value of this advocacy work, I’m convinced that supporting Bread is the best way to leverage my charitable giving. That’s why I’ve been a Bread member for thirty years now.

David Beckmann, the president of Bread for the World (who was honored with last year’s World Food Prize for his leadership in the fight against hunger) recently explained to me how Bread’s work is particularly vital, productive and worth empowering with our financial support now. “Deficit hawks have learned they can shape the political landscape of our country with the tool of defunding.  We are at a point now where Congress is threatening deep cuts in the programs that provide help and opportunity to poor people in our country – programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and tax credits for the working poor,” he said. “Of course, all Americans can be enthusiastic about our government running a tight fiscal ship.  But if the budget is to be balanced on the backs of our poor, innocent children will suffer, and the civility woven into the fabric of our society will be threatened.” I see Bread for the World not as a charity but as a service. They are transforming my concern about hunger into effective action by waging a courageous and difficult battle to protect struggling people in our country and around the world.

So here’s my challenge to you for this Christmas: Help Bread for the World’s dedicated staff do their work with your gift of $100. As a thank you, I’ll send you three gifts: my Rick Steves’ European Christmas DVD (our PBS-TV special which celebrates a traditional, non-commercial, and sacred Christmas in seven different countries); our European Christmas coffee-table book (sharing the fun insights and best photos I picked up while producing this special); and the Christmas music CD we produced while filming (featuring our 20 favorite European carols). I’ll happily pay for the cost of these gifts and postage so that Bread can use 100 percent of your donation for their work. Make your gift by Dec. 15th and you’ll get everything in time for Christmas.

It’s my hope that these gifts will bring a wonderful new twist to your family celebrations for years to come (as they have for mine) while enticing you to empower Bread for the World with your donation. To learn more and make your gift to Bread, please follow this link.

Thanks and Merry Christmas,

Rick

P.S. For every dollar Bread raises, it leverages $100 in terms of development aid and funding vital to the lives of poor and hungry people in our country and abroad.

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My Favorite Travel Moments in 2011

With each trip I take, I bring home magic memories — travelers’ gold nuggets of experiences I will remember all my life. In this month’s edition of Travel News, in words and pictures, I’m sharing a few favorite moments that gave my 2011 travels that extra sparkle:

 

All of my Protestant life I’ve watched hard-scrabble pilgrims and frail nuns climb Rome’s Scala Santa (Holy Steps) on their knees. I always observed as though they were in a parallel universe. This year, I passed into that universe. I picked up the little pilgrim’s primer explaining what holy thoughts to ponder on each step, knelt down, and — one by one — began climbing the Scala Santa. Knees on stone, I experienced each of the steps Jesus climbed on his way to being condemned by Pontius Pilate. If they could, my kneecaps would have been screaming. In my pain, the art that engulfed the staircase snapped into action. And, while my knees would never agree, the experience was beautiful.
  

I’m not the cocktails-at-happy-hour type of traveler. But this year, in the early evening light, with no harsh shadows to darken the natural pastel pretty of Siena’s stones, I sat at the best table overlooking Il Campo — my favorite square in Europe — and enjoyed a cocktail. After a leisurely hour presiding over the passegiatta action that turns Il Campo into “il Italian fashion show,” I left thinking that was the best five euros I could have spent.
 

This year I saw lots of travelers with new-fangled tablets, reading my guidebooks electronically. It’s so fun to see people touring with a non-print version of my work. In Florence, I experienced a moment when the future arrived. In the shadow of David, a tourist handed me something and asked, “Can you sign my nook, please?”
  

Every dad knows that the worst way to have your son embrace something you care about is to push for it. I’ve made a careful point to let my 24-year-old son, Andy, blaze his own path. It turns out he’s every bit as much of a creature of the road as I was in my twenties. For half the year, Andy basically lives on the road in Europe — sleeping in hostels and running his student tour business out of cafes that offer free Wi-Fi with a drink. We crossed paths in Florence and hung out together for a few days. He even got a cameo in one of my TV episodes (joining us for a dinner on film). When it was time for him to head out, he dropped by my hotel room to say goodbye. Hugging Andy, loaded up with all his gear, I marveled at this young man’s physical and emotional strength. Afterward, from my third story hotel room window, I secretly watched him walk across the Piazza S.S. Annunziata, and plunge back into his backpacker world. It was a meaningful moment: My son travels with a fresh spirit, curiosity and boundless energy that I find inspiring.
 

My TV crew and I are often charged a lot of money to film inside great museums and palaces on days when they are closed to the public. While sometimes a headache, this comes with the joy of being all alone with great art. This past year I’ve been aroused (artistically) while alone with Klimt’s Kiss in Vienna. In Paris, I’ve stood silent and solitary in the splendor of the glorious, gothic Sainte-Chapelle, the mysterious Mona Lisa, and the exquisite Unicorn Tapestry. In Italy, I’ve been all alone with a room full of Botticelli paintings, with Bernini’s Apollo Chasing Daphne, with Leonardo’s Last Supper, and with two masterful Davids — Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s. Each experience was a kind of artistic climax, leaving me craving a cigarette.
  

I’ve never spent much time fantasizing about parachuting or hang gliding. I’ve accepted the notion that if God wanted me to fly, he’d have given me wings. I’m happy to be on the ground. But this summer I learned that even if I wasn’t blessed with wings, I’ve got an abundance of hot air and you can fly quite well with little more than that. I’ve always loved Cappadocia in Central Turkey. And this summer, while enjoying one of our Turkey tours, I joined the group for a majestic hot air balloon ride over the fairy chimneys of that exotic landscape. From the moment our basket slipped from land borne to air borne, I gazed in wonder, mesmerized, at the erosion-shaped stretch of Anatolia so steeped in memories of the struggles of civilization after civilization that have called this land home. Suspended gracefully over Cappadocia, I felt perfectly safe, at peace, delighted to put my fate in the hands of our Turkish captain.
 

For years I’ve visited Hadrian’s Wall, the remains of the fortification the Romans built 1800 years ago to mark the northern end of their empire, where Britannia stopped and where the barbarian land that would someday be Scotland began. But I never ventured beyond the National Trust properties, the museums, and viewpoints from various car parks. This year, cameraman in tow, I grabbed a sunny late afternoon to actually hike the wall. When you’re scrambling along Roman ruins, all alone with the sound of the wind, surveying vast expanses of Britain from rocky crags that seem to rip across that island (like a snapshot freezing some horrific geological violence in mid-action) you need to take a moment and simply absorb your setting. As my cameraman did his work, I did just that.
  

Great teachers are heroes to me. They’ve shined lights where I had been in darkness. They’ve inspired me with things I’d thought were mundane. While their teaching must seem repetitive to them, with each student they get renewed, recognizing a need and filling it. Great teachers teach with passion and love. And they do it long past a normal retirement age, as if it is their purpose on this planet. One of these teachers is Malcolm Miller at Chartres. For thirty years I’ve been coming to see “Malcolm’s” great cathedral, its spires rising above the fields as I approach it from a distance. My heart leaps at the sight, as did the hearts of approaching pilgrims centuries ago. I come to Chartres on a kind of pilgrimage of my own…to be a student again...to be inspired. Twice a day, Malcolm Miller still meets with small groups of curious travelers. He sits them down on pews in front of his stained-glass “window of the day” and, as if opening a book, tells the story that window was created to tell. There, in Europe’s most magnificently decorated Gothic cathedral, Malcolm Miller gives voice to otherwise silent masterpieces of that age. This past year I was again in the front row, eager as a teacher’s pet, learning from Malcolm Miller.
 

Coming from a picnicking, backpacker travel heritage, it’s taken me decades to recognize the value of a fine meal. Now, I can enthusiastically embrace a long, drawn-out “splurge meal” as a wonderful investment in time and money. I traveled through France this past summer with my buddy (and co-author of our France guidebook) Steve Smith. After each long day of research, we treated ourselves to the best meal in town, dedicated to the notion that you’re not really paying $50 for the food — it’s a three-hour sensual experience that happens to include your evening’s nourishment. Describing the very best meal of our trip — from start to finish, in elaborate detail — was a productive writing exercise. It not only gave me a great Facebook entry…it trained me to eat with sensory abandon.
  

Returning to the same places year after year is not the best way to broaden my repertoire of travel delights that I hope to share with my readers. So my guidebook research has evolved into a system where I send a trusted fellow researcher into a town ahead of me to update all the nitty-gritty on restaurants, hotels, museums, prices and transportation ins-and-outs. I can then devote my limited time to what I call “living” the town or destination: climb the spire, rent a bike, enjoy a sunset drink at that bar with a view, join fans at the soccer stadium, and so on. Visiting my favorite village in the Swiss Alps this past summer, it occurred to me that I’d already ridden the lifts and hiked all the trails around Gimmelwald. But there was one experience listed in our book that I had yet to do personally: traverse the cliff-side cable-way called the Via Ferrata. So, my friend Olle and I pulled on mountaineering harnesses and clipped our carabineers onto the first stretch of a three kilometer-long cable, setting off with a local guide on the “iron way” from Murren to Gimmelwald. The route does not follow the top of the cliff that separates the high country from Lauterbrunnen Valley — it takes you along the very side of the cliff, like a tiny window-washer on a geologic skyscraper. The “trail” ahead of me was a series of steel rebar spikes jutting out from the side of the cliff. The cable, carabineer and harness were there in case I passed out. For me, physically, this was the max. I was almost numb with fear. After one particularly harrowing crossing — gingerly taking one rebar step after another — I said to the guide, “Okay, now it gets easier?” And he said, “No. Now comes Die Hammer Ecke (Hammer Corner)!” For a couple hundred meters we crept across a perfectly vertical cliff face — feet gingerly gripping rebar steps, cold and raw hands on the cable, tiny cows and a rushing river 2000 feet below me, a rock face rocketing directly above me with my follow-the-cable horizontal path bending out of sight in either direction. When we finally reached the end and I unclipped my carabineer for the last time, I hugged our guide like a full-body high-five, knowing this was an experience of a lifetime. For the next several nights I awoke in the wee hours, clutching my mattress.

Thoughtful, rewarding travel goes way beyond collecting famous sights. It’s leaving our comfort zones to have experiences that surprise, thrill, challenge, enrich and inspire us. These create insights and memories that we’ll forever treasure. So raise a glass. Here’s to — for all of us and those we love — a heaping helping of rewarding travel moments in 2012.

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Let’s Play Twenty Questions!

Magazines love giving their readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at people they might find interesting. So I get a lot of magazine writers sending me lists of quirky and personal questions. Here’s an example of an interview I just did. I thought, if this magazine’s readers get these answers, my blog readers should too. So here goes:

1) Where would you rather be right now? Right where I am. I’ve been on the road for five of the last seven months, and I’m happy to be home.

2) Famous person (dead or alive, real or fictional) you’d most like to go on a trip with? Napoleon to Russia…perhaps to Moscow for Christmas.

3) Tourist must-see you think is actually a “must-skip”? Orlando.

4) Everyone asks what’s #1 on your list of places you want to go before you die. But what’s your #3? The cruise from Seattle to Alaska.

5) You’d be mortified if people knew you did what when you traveled? Steal lunch from the breakfast buffet.

6) Your most stranded, “oh-my-[deity]” travel moment? On the overnight ferry ride from Norway to Denmark, I slept through Denmark and woke up halfway back to Norway. I was very tired. It was embarrassing to go downstairs to the ferry car deck and see my car being the only one out of a hundred facing the other way. It cost me a day of my itinerary…but gave me a fun memory.

7) Best (or worst) person/people you’ve had to sit next to while traveling? I was surrounded by a bunch of very frightening Russian no-necks on a flight from Tallinn in Estonia. One got a phone call, and his ringtone was the sound of a rifle being cocked. They made me want to crawl into the place under my seat where the life jacket is stowed.

8) Strangest meal abroad? Sitting at a cafeteria in Kabul, I was joined by an Afghan professor who took it upon himself to spend the entire meal explaining to me that “one-third of the people on this planet eat with spoons and forks like you, one third eat with chopsticks, and one third eat with their fingers like me — and we’re all civilized just the same.”

9) If someone was visiting your town, what’s the one thing you’d show them? I’d take them to the baseball stadium and show them a good time with really American food.

10) Travel-related invention you wish existed? A powder that would wash your clothes simply by the rubbing action that comes with wearing them.

11) Your most embarrassing travel faux pas? Having the exciting opportunity to eat lunch with a big-city travel editor when I was just getting started, reviewing the menu, and — upon seeing “quiche” — asking, “What’s kwee-shee?”

12) Material thing you miss the most when away from home? My piano.

13) Most unique souvenir? The horns of a bull I saw killed in the ring in Sevilla and then slaughtered out back.

14) Best celebrity encounter while traveling? Being in a crypt surrounded by urns filled with the vital organs of centuries of Habsburg kings and queens.

15) Most unusual item you have travelled with? Mukluks (wool slippers with leather bottoms).

16) Coolest mode of transport you’ve taken? A trenino on the Italian Riviera (the tiny monorail train that takes vintners up the hills when working their vineyards).

17) The place you don’t want anyone to know about but are willing to divulge here? Orlando.

18) Travel-related film or book that inspires you to pack your bags? Movies: Yol for Turkey, Singing Revolution for Estonia, The Way for Galicia in northwest Spain, and three movies by Deepa Mehta for India: Water, Fire, and Earth.

19) The travel story you’ll never stop bragging about? How I got to give the Christkind (the Bavarian princess of Christmas…and quite a celebrity there) a kiss on the cheek.

20) Lay on us a few priceless bits of travel advice or wisdom.  If you equip yourself with good information and expect yourself to travel smart, you can. There are two IQs for European travelers: those who wait in lines, and those who don’t wait in lines. Fear is for people who don’t get out much.

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Warning: Email Scams About Travelers in Distress

We are all caring and compassionate people who would come to the aid of a friend in an instant. That’s what Internet con artists prey on. If you ever receive an email ostensibly from a friend or relative in a foreign land who is in a cash bind and asks you to wire them money — ignore it. Let your friend know that their email account has been hijacked and their friends are at risk of being scammed. Here is an email I just received that appears to be from someone I know, but which actually tries to fool loved ones into giving money to crooks. It’s obviously a scam. Beware. This is just one of countless versions of this trick.

Hi Friend,

I hope this finds you well. I am presently in Madrid in Spain with my ill Cousin. She’s suffering from a critical uterine fibroid and must undergo hysterectomy surgery to save her life. I am deeply sorry for not writing or calling you before leaving, the news of her illness arrived to me as an emergency and that she needs family support to keep her going, I hope you understand my plight and pardon me.

 

Hysterectomy surgery is very expensive here, so I want to transfer her back home to have the surgery implemented in the USA. I am wondering if you can be of any assistance to me, I need about €2,850 to make the necessary arrangement; I traveled with little money due to the short time I had to prepare for this trip and never expected things to be the way it is right now. I’ll surely pay you back once I get back home, I need to get her home ASAP because she is going through a lot of pain at the moment and the doctor have advised that it is necessary  the tumor is operated soon to avoid anything from going wrong. I’ll reimburse you at my return.

First name…….. Mary
last name………Carter
address……..Calle Atocha 45
city…………. Madrid
country……… Spain
zip code……..69150


Send the money to my name i give to you through western union today are get back to me with the full details.