The trip is over, the two long flights merely unpleasant memories. Our tour group consisted of around 40 people and virtually everybody came down with a cold that resulted mostly in much coughing. There were times when the tour bus sounded like an early morning TB ward. Our luggage made it through relatively unscathed, only one small broken loop on a zipper pull. Some good friends had one suitcase go missing somewhere between JFK and SFO, and of course it was the one with the clean clothes in it.
Looking back, there were things we could have done differently that would have made the trip better but, on the whole, it was well done. The organizer, Grand Circle Tours of Boston, generally does nice work. They do an especially fine job of the European river cruises on the Rhine, Danube, Moselle, and Volga. We haven't tried the ones in France. They are small ship specialists, although they do plenty of bus-transported land tours too. We avoid those because we tend to fall asleep on buses and don't need to pay GCT to organize naps for us. The fault is ours, not theirs. Bus rides of over 1/2 hour just put us to sleep.
One thing that really strikes us about the so-called "third world:" nobody seems to be interested in doing any maintenance on buildings. We stayed in nice hotels in Egypt and Jordan which had what the other DrC calls "good bones," that is, they were nice when new. If their operators had kept them up they would be nice yet, but of course they have not done the day-to-day repairs and upgrades that hotels need. Somehow the cultures don't emphasize taking care of what exists. Yet another example of dysfunctional culture
One of these days I need to do a column about the relative functionality of cultures; not all are created equal in their ability to produce relative affluence for their adherents.
