A Bit About UsWe are a family of four, who love to travel and spend time together. Rick and Jody have been married almost 40 years, and celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary with a Rick Steves Tour of Italy. Both work in the healthcare field (as a pediatrician and pharmacist) in Akron, Ohio. Their daughter, Elyse, lives near her parents in Ohio, where she works as an attorney for a research university. Their globetrotting son, Justin, recently graduated from Oxford with a Ph.D. in physics and just moved to Lausanne, Switzerland. As you'll see from our website, all of us have a deep affection for food, sarcasm, foreign road signs, and long wandels in the park.
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See Our Tour in 2 Minutes
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Our Tiny Tour GroupOur tour group was an intimate one this time with only a dozen souls plus Nina, our tour guide. Friendships formed easily with our limited number and we came to know everyone's patterns. If you could get up early enough to catch John and Lisa, they would have a rigorous agenda planned for their free hours and would clue you in on the best sights in town. Elizabeth, who spent her free time pursuing Europe's famous paintings, was your best buddy at art museums. Her roommate, Arlene, was always the most fun to sit beside on bus rides as she had dozens of stories about her adventures when she was young and carefree. Gail and Alan were always happy to share their excursions from free time spent that day and seemed to know the best place to grab a beer and catch the EuroCup. College friends, Alice and Pat, were the experts on local shopping and eagerly displayed their purchases. The amazing thing is that they even remembered the stores they visited and directions to get there. Our tour group was an interesting collection, as I am sure most are, but its limited size made us all more comfortable sharing our lives. The times we spent together immersing ourselves in local culture, being entertained by local guides, seeing great works of art and even sharing a glass of Brugse Zot are the key components for a fabulous trip.
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Nina Dierckx - Our Tour Guide, Mentor, and Friend
A tour guide with exceptional knowledge and perhaps an overabundance of consonants
A great tour guide must wear many hats and be able to switch them out in a moment's notice. Nina was a quick-change artist and managed to herd our diverse group onto boats and buses, across bridges and canals, and into and out of museums and churches. It takes skill to keep a group of tired and sometimes hungry tour members moving toward the next attraction, often in the rain, with knowledge and humor. Despite the fact that she had led this tour many times before, we were impressed with Nina's ability to tailor this trip through the Netherlands just for us. Quickly learning our likes and dislikes, Nina helped us to find wonderful things to do in our free time. One evening, she made a reservation for our family at a small, family-owned restaurant where we had a wonderful meal listening to an entertaining local group. She became our friend. Rick found great delight in finding some way to tease her every day. Nina watched out for us, making sure we were okay financially when our ATM card was eaten by a machine in a small town along the road. Nina was the perfect tour guide being a combination of local expert, skillful teacher, and best friend with a tiny bit of mother thrown in for good measure.
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The Supporting Cast
Tour Guides are wonderful to give you the big picture, but the local guides give you a perspective on each city that helps you to understand the artwork, museums, churches and simply the city in general. They are the cherry on top of the sundae.
Why Rick Steves?Simply put, we took a Rick Steves Tour because we wanted to make the most of our time in Europe. For most of the family, this was our fourth Rick Steves Tour. And while we've always appreciated the stress-free travel between cities and the centrally-located hotels, the real magic is in how the tours immerse us all in the culture of each country and engage us with new people in each city. Our tour guide, Nina, grew up in Flanders, Belgium and was always ready to share a story or joke about Belgian and Dutch culture. In each city, we met a local guide, who showed us around historic neighborhoods and explained what made the city's architecture, history and culture unique. Sure, we saw famous sites, like the Anne Frank House or Flanders Field, but we were also introduced to unexpected attractions - the Holland Flower Market, North Sea beaches and a modern Dutch dam - that reflect how the Belgians and Dutch live today. During our free time, we got to stroll through quiet side streets, drink hot chocolate along a canal and ride bikes past windmills. Even better, we shared the whole experience with new friends, whose diverse interests gave us incredible opportunities to make the most of our time in Europe. Whether it was staring closely at a Dutch master painting, talking about European and American politics, or just grabbing a Belgian beer, there was always someone happy to share the experience with us.
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Our 11-day tour included overnight stays in Ghent, Bruges, Delft and Amsterdam with plenty of fun stops along the way
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Frequently Asked Questions about our Rick Steves Tour ExperienceWhen we got back from our tour and started sharing our hundreds of photos with family and friends, several common questions kept cropping up.
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Trixie and Sirius begged to be taken along on our next Rick Steves' adventure when they learned how much fun we had
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Navigating Our Website
Don't miss our favorite things in each city that are titled "Picks of the Litter".
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Tips
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Keeping Things Light
We'd like to share a few of our tips about packing:
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