River Cruising With a TV Host
Alki Tours’ Holland and Belgium River Cruise with Amadeus River Cruises puts passengers on board a river cruise with a national television host: Eric Johnson of PBS’ “GardenSmart.”
“The whole idea is it’s an interactive opportunity for people to learn and live their passion on their holiday and bringing them that much closer, in this case, with public television,” said Tyson Verse, travel manager with Alki Tours.
Johnson and his crew will be filming on the trip as well as hosting seminars and participating in cruise events.
The trip begins in Amsterdam with a visit to the Rijksmuseum, where guests can see works by Rembrandt and Vermeer up close, followed by a stop at the Van Gogh Museum. In Amsterdam, travelers can also visit the Hortus Botanicus, which was founded in 1638, making it one of the world’s oldest botanical gardens.
During a tour of Aalsmeer Flower Auction, Europe’s largest building, filled with acres of flowers, groups will learn about how the auction sells some 20 million flowers daily from around the world. Keukenhof is an 80-acre garden with more than 7 million tulips, daffodils and hyacinths. The garden is “the best of everything on show,” Verse said, and the bulbs are planted at different depths, a technique called lasagna or layer planting, so there’s always something blooming.
But the cruise isn’t only for gardeners; it includes stops in Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent and excursions to castles, windmills and World War I museums and memorials. Kinderdijk is a village known for its elaborate network of historic 18th-century windmills, pumps, dikes and reservoirs that control flooding in the lowland.
“We try to keep the entire audience interested,” Verse said.
Ghost Tours and Towns in Nevada
Mark Hoffmann, president and founder of Sports Leisure Vacations, is a skeptic when it comes to the supernatural. But the more experiences he has during ghost hunts in the ghost town of Goodsprings, Nevada, the more he can’t explain — including a recent encounter that hit close to home.
Sports Leisure Vacation’s six-day Death Valley and Nevada Ghost Towns itinerary departs from Sacramento, California, and travels to Las Vegas. From there, guests will visit several Old West ghost towns where they’ll find old miners’ cabins, abandoned post offices and deserted train stations.
In Goodsprings, the group goes on a ghost hunt, a tour that for years was led by Robert George Allen, a retired entertainer who started the Haunted Vegas tour and who recently passed away. Each person has a “ghost box” to ask spirits yes or no questions. During a recent trip, Hoffmann’s ghost box was lighting up, which indicates a spiritual presence. After asking several questions, Hoffmann finally asked, “Robert George Allen, is that you?” And the box “blinked like crazy,” he said.
Goodsprings’ other claim to fame is the 100-year-old saloon where Clark Gable awaited word about Carol Lombard’s plane crash.
“He sat there and burned a hole in the bar with his cigar,” Hoffmann said.
The remote town of Belmont doesn’t have power, but it does have people — about a dozen residents. And those residents welcome visitors to see the ruins of collapsed buildings, the remains of partially standing structures and the Belmont Courthouse, which locals are trying to restore.
The company recently expanded the itinerary to add Death Valley National Park, where guests will spend two nights at the Oasis at Death Valley, formerly the Furnace Creek Resort.
Cross the Border Into Mexico
Few motorcoach tour operators still offer itineraries that cross the southern border into Mexico, but Gray Line Tours is — proudly — one of them.
TJ Morgan is president and CEO of the Tucson, Arizona-based company that his grandfather started in 1916 as Citizen Auto Stage Company. Gray Line offers a variety of itineraries, among them Best of the Barrio, which explores Tucson through its Sonoran cuisine, and the Border Crisis: Fact and Fiction tour, which was designed to allow people to go on personal fact-finding missions and see the border firsthand in a safe and secure way.
But for people who want to travel into Mexico, Gray Line’s Beaches of Rocky Point, Mexico, itinerary is a “nice, safe way for people to get an exposure to Mexico tourism,” Morgan said. “Rocky Point is very safe.”
For those who have never traveled to the country and feel unsure about the best way to do so, Gray Line drives its motorcoach across the border to the beachfront Peñasco Del Sol Hotel. Gray Line’s bilingual guide has built a relationship with the border agents, and the drive is about four hours total: three hours to the border, then one more hour to the hotel.
The resort fronts the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, and when guests arrive, they enjoy a margarita reception at the hotel. While there, groups can opt to take a sunset cruise, a bird island boat tour or a whale-watching trip with EcoFun Rentals, which also rents kayaks, paddleboards and boogie boards to beachgoers.
Travelers will visit Rocky Point’s Old Port, where they can buy fresh seafood from fish markets and explore curio shops filled with handmade knickknacks and souvenirs.
