Welcome to Milestones and Memories:
My Way: Alpine Europe in 12 Days Tour
with Rick Steves
July 2016
Planning and Introductory Thoughts
Pre Tour: Minor Attractions of Munich
Day 2: Mining, Monchsburg, and Mozart
Day 7: The Madness of King Ludwig
Day 8: Make Way for Prince Ali
Post Tour Day 1: When You Wish Upon a Star
Post Tour Day 2: New Heights and Bandes Dessinées
Post Tour Day 3: When You've Seen One Napoleon...
This scrapbook is arranged by days, and you can use either the header or the links below to navigate through it.
Planning and Introductory Thoughts
Why this tour?
We had traveled to Athens and the Heart of Greece with the awesome Colleen Murphy in 2006 on a fully guided Rick Steves tour, and we loved it. We always said we were going to do another, but the times were not convenient or the itineraries not exactly what we wanted, and we had not gotten to it. And then Bill wanted to go to the Alps for his birthday, and I found a Rick Steves tour that did the Alps. We looked at it, and it was a My Way tour, not a fully guided tour, so there was going to be a fair amount of planning our own days, but I could see how you might need that in the Alps with the variety of outdoor activities available. The itinerary looked good to us, a mix of places we had been before and wanted to return to and places that we had not visited and wanted to see.
Us at Ehrenberg Castle
Planning
We decided well over a year in advance that we would go, and I out picked out the dates (July 4-15, 2016) and put down a deposit over Thanksgiving weekend.
I purchased the plane tickets and trip insurance in January, as well as purchasing the guide book for this trip, which I read over and over again. I may have been a bit excited. :) We also watched all the Rick Steves television shows which covered stops on this tour -- multiple times.
In February I booked our pre tour night in Salzburg and our post tour hotels in Lyon and Paris.
In April I bought TGV train tickets for our trip from Lyon to Paris.
In May I happened to be looking at the Eiffel Tower web site and looked up ticket availability on a whim. They actually had times available when we were there, so I bought advance tickets.
We received our tour roster and final hotel list about a month before the trip in early June, and over the next week I bought tickets to a concert at Mirabell Palace in Salzburg, tickets for the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology (which turned out not to have been necessary, but it did save us a little time on the day), and tickets to Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau. If you want to visit Neuschwanstein in peak season, a month before is not too early to book the tickets. One of the other members of our group tried to get them a week before and couldn't. Know that when you fill out the online form, you are only sending a request. They get back to you and tell you what is actually available. In our case it took about four days to hear back. We did not purchase Aiguille du Midi tickets in advance, and that turned out to be for the best for us because the weather was not great when we were there.
One day I asked my husband what he wanted to do for his 50th birthday. It was clearly understood by both of us that this was going to involve travel. He replied "Go to the Alps." And so the trip planning began.
We are Beth and Bill, two librarians from Orlando, Florida, and this was our tenth trip to Europe and second Rick Steves tour. We wanted it to be special because it was our tenth trip, and it was for Bill's birthday, and it was our first time celebrating our wedding anniversary in Europe. And, spoiler alert, it was special. Come travel with us and experience our milestones and memories!