EUROPEAN CHARM & OBERAMMERGAU - 2010

13 days incl. travel, or 12 days from Amsterdam to Paris (HBO)

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Vacation Overview

See some of Europe’s most famous cities and picturesque towns. Begin in Amsterdam with guided sightseeing, a canal cruise, and a visit to a major diamond center. Heading southeast, enter Germany, pausing in magnificent Cologne to visit its twin-spired gothic cathedral. Next, cruise down the Rhine past lush vineyards and castle-dotted river banks to beautiful Heidelberg and medieval Rothenburg. Spend two nights in Bavarian Munich, then off to King Ludwig’s fairytale Neuschwanstein Castle and the Passion Play village of Oberammergau. Travel through the majestic Alps via Innsbruck to Venice, where a guided walking tour includes St. Mark’s Basilica, Doges’ Palace, and the Bridge of Sighs. Stop in Italian-speaking Lugano before arriving in Lucerne to admire its Lion Monument and Chapel Bridge. Spend a night in Montreux, and in Lausanne, board the high-speed TGV train to Paris. Guided sightseeing in the “City of Light” features Notre Dame Cathedral, the Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Élysées, and a bird’s-eye view of the city from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower.

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Things to see on your vacation: View Vacation Photo Slideshow

A Vacation Story Eiffel Tower

Imagining Paris without the Eiffel Tower is like London without Big Ben or San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge. But no sooner had the architect Gustav Eiffel beaten his 700 competitors in the design competition for the 1889 Centennial Exposition, celebrating a century since the French Revolution, than a vocal outcry began to halt construction of the edifice. Three hundred famous French artists and writers signed a petition in the newspaper “Le Temps” denouncing Eiffel’s radically modern design as “useless and monstrous,” a blight upon the elegant fabric of the City of Light. Others critics were even more vicious, describing the proposed tower as a “tragic street lamp,” a gymnasium apparatus…incomplete, confused and deformed,” “a giant ungainly skeleton,” “a half-built factory pipe,” “a carcass” and even “a hole-riddled suppository.” Nature-lovers argued that it would disturb the flight patterns of Parisian birds. Even as the iron lattice began to rise, Parisians continued to refer to it by the less-than-flattering nickname, “the metal asparagus.” Of course, no sooner had the tower opened in 1889 than the rabid criticism evaporated.