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Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Here you can browse through my blog posts prior to February 2022. Currently I'm sharing my travel experiences, candid opinions, and what's on my mind solely on my Facebook page. — Rick

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Laughter and Joy with Our Family of Guides

Imagine having over a hundred European tour guides from 20 different countries fill your home with fun, laughter, and joyful energy. Plug in a mic and speaker in the living room for announcements, clean out the garage and throw down a carpet, borrow some extra chairs, hire a food truck to bring in dinner, and make sure there’s a bar downstairs to spread out the crowd…I’m still buzzing from this fun evening.

 

Rick Steves at party

 

We have the most wonderful family of guides at Rick Steves’ Europe Tours. Every year, we fly them all in for a weeklong tour guide workshop here in Edmonds (just north of Seattle). Each day is full of tour-related teaching, sharing, and planning. And each evening, it’s time for bonding and social fun. For six nights, we pack various venues (and, later on, many invade a couple of bars on Main Street for after-parties).

 

Tour guides at Edmonds bar

 

I love our guides. They are remarkable people — big personalities with a love of culture, who embrace life with gusto, and who love to share their passion for their homelands. They also love American culture and their American travelers. Our annual summit is unique for them because they get a chance to be with all their colleagues — 140 kindred spirits.

We always try to give our guides a little dose of America during their annual visit. This year, we hired classic American school buses to shuttle the gang to a nearby Indian reservation with a casino, lots of big-box stores, an outlet mall, and Cabela’s — the gun-lover’s nirvana. (I heard one of our German guides remark, “We rode the American school bus to the gun shop. They even had pink guns for the ladies.”) That evening, the school buses headed into Seattle for swing dancing lessons in an old ballroom. And we capped the week with a 1920s-themed dance party, featuring a beer brewed especially for the occasion (“Swell Fella Amber”). Everyone dressed up like flappers and Al Capone (or the guy at the soda fountain).

 

Swell Fella beer

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Thanks to Trish Feaster (The Travelphile) for the photos in this post!

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A Busy Week with Our Guides

Each winter, we celebrate Rick Steves’ Europe Tours with tour alum reunion parties, a tour guide summit, and a series of travel talks called “Test Drive a Tour Guide.” It’s all-hands-on-deck during this weeklong series of overlapping events, and I was just too busy to post — but I’m still thinking about all the fun we had, and I’d like to share some of it with you now.

 

 

For me, the most important part of the week is spending time with the guides (this year, 140 of them). We fly them in from all over Europe and the USA to our Edmonds headquarters for workshops, lectures, and discussions. Our travelers have high expectations (and nearly half of them are return customers), and we need to be sure we offer the maximum economy, efficiency, and experience for all who trust us with their vacation time and money.

 

Photo: The Travelphile

At this year’s guide summit, I got to share a three-hour slideshow and lecture on what exactly a “Rick Steves tour” is (using photos I shot, with this talk in mind, on five tours over the last three years). And, our Tour Ops staff hosted an extensive round-table discussion for each of our 44 European tour itineraries, giving guides a chance to share lessons learned over the past year and to make sure that every hour on each itinerary is smartly designed.

This year, we also flew in our favorite Rome guide, Francesca Caruso, to give the entire team a powerful and inspirational talk on teaching art history and giving a good walking tour. (“Concise” is not brief. “Concise” is precise and clear. To make a tight talk, you select material, organize, and refine. A logical procession of ideas is less tiring to follow. A mind is not “a vessel to be filled” but “a fire to be kindled.”)

With all these guides in town every year, we figured, “Why not give them the stage and let them help us sell their tours?” So, we put on a daylong series of “Test Drive a Tour Guide” talks at three venues. (You can watch several of these presentations at home. Just go to the “Test Drive a Tour Guide” playlist on the Rick Steves’ Europe Tours Facebook page.) 

 

 

Meanwhile, the gym is converted into a big party room for tour alums to gather and reconnect with their tour buddies and guides. (Yesterday, I posted a peek at the fun I had at one of these parties.)

 

Photo: The Travelphile

And, to get even more value out of this grand summit, our radio team lines up about 25 hours of interviews with guides in our Travel with Rick Steves radio studio. This year, our recordings were what my radio crew and I consider the best ever. Here are the interview topics and schedule (as you can see, it was all a lot of fun for us):

 

 

There’s nothing like sitting down with a couple of guides — whether from Sweden, Ireland, or Sicily — and hearing all about their homeland.

 

Photo: Experience Lyon with Virginie

 

After the guides all went home, my radio producer Tim Tattan put together this great little clip, featuring some of our conversations (as well as a few other snippets from the Travel with Rick Steves program archive):

https://www.facebook.com/ricksteves/videos/10155922590202745/

 

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Video: Soaking Up the Fun at Our Tour Alum Party

2017 was our best year ever at Rick Steves’ Europe Tours. We took 24,000 travelers on about 1,000 tours. My favorite statistic: 45 percent of those were return travelers — alums who were coming back for more.

Every January, we invite everyone who traveled with us in the previous year to a huge bash in my hometown of Edmonds, WA. We rent out the biggest space in town — my old junior high school gym — and throw five parties over two days. And, to make it even more fun, we fly guides in from all over Europe and the USA. This year, 140 of our guides joined us.

In this clip, you can experience one of the parties with me. I’m taking just a minute to sit in the bleachers and soak up the fun and joyful energy — so many happy travelers, reconnecting with their tour buddies and their guides…sharing scrapbooks, tour memories, and future travel dreams. In a moment, I’ll call the party to order and introduce six of our tour guides for an entertaining welcome from different countries around Europe. Then, I’ll give out prizes for the travelers who’ve taken the most of our tours. (Winners typically have traveled with us more than 15 times. With our unique cumulative tour alum discount, we finished making any money off of them long ago!) And later, I’ll see buddies from the two tours I joined last year: the Best of Sicily Tour and the Best of Ireland Tour.

Thanks to all who traveled with us on a 2017 Rick Steves tour!

BTW, I’m addicted to these tours. I just can’t help myself. Every year, I page through our tour catalog and sign up for at least one under a pseudonym. (It’s fun — I get letters from myself.) And then, I surprise the group at our welcome meeting on the first day. This year, I’m taking one of our Portugal tours.)

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Video: Swimming in a Cenote

Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula is flat as a tortilla and blanketed with a thick jungle. Surveying the landscape from the top of a Mayan pyramid, the only bumps on what looks like a vast green carpet are unexcavated Mayan pyramids. The land is honeycombed with sinkholes, called “cenotes,” that are filled with crystal-clear fresh water. Some are like pristine lakes, surrounded by lush vegetation. Others are in dramatic caves, lit by sunrays streaking through holes in the natural ceiling.

A highlight of any Yucatán adventure is to swim in a cenote. I was here 30 years ago, and my memories of a cenote swim were so dreamy, I had to see if they could actually be as ethereal as I remembered. In this clip, I visit a cenote again with my family.

(On my first visit to the Yucatán, the cenotes were free and empty. Today, most are privately owned by families who build wooden staircases into them and charge visitors a few dollars to enter.)

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Video: A Tasty Meal in the Yucatán

If you like Mexican food, you’d love the Yucatán, where I vacationed with my family this winter.

This little clip illustrates the value of having your own local guide. For our visit, we hired Diego Viadero of Pixan Travel. Like any good guide, Diego worked hard, knew his stuff, and (at $180 a day) was a great investment. I’d rather hire a local guide who designs full days of travel than take a series of half-day tours. (And, with a family of five, a local guide didn’t cost any more than the tours would have.)

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