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
I make sure to spend some time in France every year with Steve Smith, my co-author and coach in all things French. Our mission: to update our France guidebook. This year, we’re double-teaming Alsace and the WWI sights, and I’m loving France more than ever.
This clip illustrates that France’s romantic, idyllic yesterday — as well as its vibrant today — is all yours when you know where to find it.
Wherever you travel, there are artistic and cultural riches waiting to be appreciated. Just be there, take the time to notice it, add information, and shake. That’s our challenge as travelers.
I have spent 40 years teaching budget travel tips. But only recently have I discovered the most important budget tip of all: Understand what you are experiencing, and it becomes twice as rewarding. Think about it: If you equip yourself with good information and use it, a travel moment — for the same price — is suddenly worth double. That’s been my theme this year as I’ve worked on my guidebooks from Sicily to Lisbon, Belfast to Orkney, and now here in France.
Join me in a quiet Colmar courtyard to simply appreciate a statue by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the man who made our Statue of Liberty. He devoted much of his life to blessing our country with a statue that celebrates what he believed makes America great. And in this smaller statue — celebrating the great pillars of the world — Bartholdi trumpets many of the same values: hard work, education, justice, and patriotism.
I always wonder if politicians who talk loosely about going to war have given much thought to the human cost of war. I’m sure they’ve traveled. But country clubs and golf courses don’t expose you to lessons of history like actually “traveling on purpose” to places that know the heartache of war.
Most visit France’s Alsace for its charming towns and delightful vineyards. I also visit Alsace to remember World War I and World War II, because this is where what I think of as the “cultural tectonic plates” of Germany and France rub up against each other. And I take every chance I can to splice a little reality between the cute stuff.
Here, a 10-minute walk above the sleepy town of Bergheim, is a German war cemetery with the remains of thousands of young Germans. They weren’t necessarily ideological Nazis. These men — actually boys, as most of them were in their teens or early twenties — just had the misfortune of living in a country ruled by a madman.
Freiburg is the lively Black Forest alternative to Baden-Baden. And in a university town like Freiburg, if you hear music in the distance, you should grab the serendipity as it flutters by and follow it. It will likely lead you to great food, great prices, live music, and lots of people embracing life (like Europeans seem so expert at doing). That’s how I ended up here — and how I found a fun listing for my Germany guidebook. That’s my mission: To find places like this so you can be equipped with all the information you need for maximum travel fun.
Exploring the Black Forest High Road (just south of Baden-Baden), we came to a section of that venerable forest that’s healing from a devastating hurricane. In 1999, Hurricane Lothar tore through here, bringing down 50,000 acres of the Black Forest in just two hours. Germany decided to let nature heal itself and built a family-friendly, half-mile-long boardwalk (Lotharpfad) through the park so people can connect with the slow-motion spectacle and cheer nature on. It’s a delightful 20-minute circular walk, easily accessible from a free parking lot.
This is the kind of fun I’ve been discovering all summer as I’ve been updating my various guidebooks with the help of local guides — like Simone Brixel (Black Forest Tours), who you see in this clip. Danke, Simone!