After a couple of years' delay, Midori and I were finally able to take the European trip we had been planning for our 25th Anniversary. We joined a tour of Italy then we went on our own to three Swiss cities.
First let me give a review of our tour company Gate 1:
It was a big question for us when we started planning this vacation whether we would use a tour or just go on our own and wing it. Having done it both ways on this trip (a group tour in Italy and on our own in Switzerland) I can confirm that they both have their good and bad points. For this trip I have to say we got really lucky when we decided to use Gate 1.
Italy is all about churches, museums, Ancient Rome and food. For going through churches and museums there is a few great advantages to being in a tour group. We went to Rome, Florence, Venice and Lecco (Lake Como) with stops at Assisi, Pisa, Verona and a Tuscan Winery. The lines to get into the Colosseum in Rome, the Vatican and many of the other churches and museums we went through were long, but because we were with a tour we got to jump to the head of the line (to get in line behind the other groups, but better than the poor folks that were on their own). Plus, once we were in we had a local tour guide in each location who did their best to keep us informed about what we were seeing, entertained so it didn't seem like just a long lecture, and they picked the highlights because there was no way to see it all. Gate 1 packed most of our group events in the morning then most of the time they allowed the rest of the day for us to wonder on our own. They had some optional excursions that people could attend or not, and we did participate in those quite a bit and by the end of our Italy tour we were pretty much done with churches! We had some really good local tour guides with the best of them being Paolo in Rome. He seemed to have a great sense of the history and could convey his knowledge of Rome both modern and ancient in a witty and eloquent way.
Of course, one of the most important parts of any tour of Italy is the food. There is a lot of time in the tour to go off on your own and find a little pizzeria or ristorante and get a plate of authentic Italian pasta. There are gelato stands in just about every direction and tons of places to just stop and have a beer or wine and relax. You might worry about getting fat with all this food and drink, but when you are on a tour of Italy you do one thing above all else: you will walk. A lot. Wear good shoes.
The person who ties the whole thing together is the tour manager, and Flavia was ours. If you go on a tour I only hope that you get a tour manager that is half as good as Flavia. For one thing, she has to be a task master. She has to heard a bunch of tourists who all want to do their own thing at their own pace, who have physical limitations sometimes, who paid good money to be on this tour so they want what they want. We all have our little dramas we have to deal with, but our group was pretty good. Or, at least it appears to me that out group was good, but that could just be because Flavia was really good at shielding the group from the drama that might be going on. It must be really difficult to organize 40 entitled American tourists, but the fact that she made it look so easy says a lot about her professionalism and skill. She did have the advantage of having a pretty young group. She told us that and we all sort of looked at each other and said "what?" Then later in the tour we saw another group go by and some of the folks in that group had walkers, canes and other geriatric accouterments and we got the picture. So, yes, in some sense she did have a young group. But even so, by the end of the second museum in Florence we had some folks in our tour that were looking pretty tired.
Over all, we would definitely recommend going to Italy as part of a tour if you don't have a local there who is willing to show you around. And we would highly recommend Gate 1. I don't know if it's the cheapest way to go, but there are a lot of built in advantages that might factor in to that equation for you. And not having to lug your own baggage around (the tour puts it on the bus, takes care of the tips and puts it in your hotel room when you get to the next town on your tour) is a big advantage.
To see a subset of our pictures (There are actually over 1500 in total) click here for Italy and here for Switzerland.
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