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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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Tropical England

While updating my Rick Steves England guidebook, I’ve endured some pretty dreary weather. So dropping into the Eden Project in Cornwall was a delightful chance to enjoy the tropics in England, and to explore the biggest rain forest in captivity. Here’s the description from the guidebook:

Set in an abandoned china clay pit, the Eden Project is an ambitious and futuristic work-in-progress – a theme park of global gardening with an environmental conscience. Exotic plants from all over the world are showcased in two giant biomes, reputedly the largest greenhouses in the world. The displays focus on sustainable farming and eco-conscious planting. If you’re looking for a quaint English cottage garden, this isn’t it. Rather than a flowery look at England’s past, this “global garden” gives you a sense of how the shrinking world will affect us in the future (www.edenproject.com). I haven’t experienced anything quite like this in my travels. Have you?

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Beauty in the Ruins of Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey is one of most beautiful and evocative sights in all of Britain. And seeing a wedding ceremony inside was icing on the cake. In this clip the harpist strums while the pastor worries about the threat of rain, and the bride is nowhere to be seen (though she finally did show up).

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Details Paint a Bigger Picture of a Little Cotswold Church

Buried in the Cotswold region of west England is the pristine village of Stanton, with what appears to be just another little medieval church. But, by knowing what to look at, you’ll see deeper. Follow me on an exercise that includes psychoanalyzing the patron saint (St. Michael, a giveaway that the church was built upon a pagan holy ground) to feeling the grooves worn into pews by sheepdog leashes centuries ago.

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Chipping Campden Silversmiths Still Hammering Out a Living

England’s Cotswolds hide many subtle dimensions of the local culture. A hundred years ago, the delightful village of Chipping Campden hosted the Arts and Crafts Movement (refugees from the Industrial Age who despised mass-produced decorative art). Today, only one shop descended from those anti-industrial-design hippies survives — the Hart Silversmiths. It was fun to meet the younger generation, whose members are still enthusiastic about the fact that “everything we make is a one-off.”

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Travelers Café

High school grads in the Alps, a “monk chat” in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and under the pillow in a Scottish B&B. There’s a lot going on in our Travelers Café where I collect my favorite blogs.

Skyla with cow

At Rick Steves’ Europe, we’ve been at this long enough that our veteran guides and travel writers have kids venturing off to Europe on their own. Skyla (daughter of Rich and Risa — writers in my office and former lead guides) and her friend Gabby are a week into their high school graduation adventure, and Skyla is blogging intimately about the experience. Reading Skyla’s report takes me back to my first solo trip — which I fondly recall as “Europe Through the Gutter” — as an 18-year-old. Skyla jokes that she should title her blog “Train Station Mishaps with Skyla.” It struck me that, for a teenager, the joy of travel is not the sights and not necessarily doing it right — it’s having fun with the process, being wonderstruck with a wider world, laughing through the mistakes and learning from them, and making friends along the way. That’s what Skyla is reporting on. They’ve figured out Paris, hiked the Alps, and are now sorting through the trains to Venice. If you have teens and are wondering about helping make the world their oyster, be sure to travel along with Skyla.

My kids, Jackie and Andy, are now in Thailand. Jackie reports that on her first day in the city of Chiang Mai, it’s already her favorite stop (beating out Bali and Vietnam). Andy and Jackie are learning about Buddhism with a program for travelers known as “monk chat.”

And my right-hand man in the guidebook-writing corner, Cameron Hewitt, continues to blog from Scotland. Scotland is a very hot destination these days (our Snapshot: Scotland guide easily outsells our England guidebook). And our Scotland tours may even be rivaling the sales of our Ireland tours. Cameron reports on the B&B scene as he searches Edinburgh for the very best places to include in our new, full-fledged Scotland guidebook. And he realizes how fascinating traditional Scottish candies are — checking out Chelsea Whoppers and other goodies at Lickety Splits.

And I’m heading for the south coast of England, blogging daily from there until I meet the TV crew again for more shows in Germany.

Thanks for traveling with us.