TRADITIONAL GRAND EUROPEAN - 2010

22 days incl. travel, or 21 days from London to Paris (KA)

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Vacation Overview

This trip covers many of Europe’s “must-see” cities and sights, including a Eurostar train ride from London to Brussels, a canal cruise in Amsterdam, a Rhine River cruise, the Black Forest, the Rhine Falls, Liechtenstein, King Ludwig’s fairytale Neuschwanstein Castle, the Passion Play town of Oberammergau, Salzburg, a private boat transfer and glassblowing demonstration in Venice, and visits to Ferrara, Pisa, and Avignon. In London, Cologne, Vienna, Venice, Florence, and Rome, visit the main cathedrals and stand-out landmarks, like Doges’ Palace in Venice, the Colosseum and Sistine Chapel in Rome, Michelangelo’s David in Florence, and a bird’s-eye view of Paris from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower. The trip of a lifetime!

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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.