A tour group can be as much of a trip as the trip itself.
By: Pat Summers
One day you move through your usual activities with familiar people, places and things. Next day, you’re in a bus with nearly 40 strangers, traveling between cities in Italy.
Everything’s new, starting with the country itself. Your comfort food, extra clothes, favorite music, good friends and animal companions are all thousands of miles away. And where did you put your (passport? best earrings? shampoo? lip gloss? sunglasses? address book … ?)
Travel by tour, in total contrast to independent travel, is an option that can sometimes seem like the only right one. The argument that clinches "escorted travel," even for tour-free veterans of other countries and other sides of the road: "Leave the driving to us."
And that can be a literal lifesaver, especially in Italy, where inhabitants madly drive cars and scooters as if there were no … one else on the road. Not to mention getting directions, gassing up, parking, even cleaning the windshield. Someone else doing all this allows you to enjoy the getting there as well as the being there.
But that clincher comes with what may be the biggest risk of any tour: travel en masse. Moving about with a busload of people can have definite downsides. Not you, of course, but others in the group can be hard to take, yet you’re all stuck together for the duration: You’ll hear them and sometimes eat with them, and you’ll have to accept that.
Although being sociable and feeling "on" for the duration can grow tiring, pleasant surprises are possible, too. Those honeymooners aren’t as saccharine as you expected, and that Texas couple turns out to have substance and compelling personal stories. The parents with two grown daughters share your interest in art.
Practically by definition, the tour group is sure to include a myriad of photographers, many of whom routinely stop dead in their tracks to raise their digital cameras and capture virtually every step they take. The lingering question here is, whatever do they do with all those images? And the minority, still using film cameras, do it with a vengeance one woman who brought 25 film rolls for one week mentioned ruefully she hadn’t finished them all.
A trade-off for tripping over photographers can be the excellent guide who comes with the tour. The "guide" does just that providing timely, useful information and advice (customs, restrooms, tipping … ) and answering questions, ranging from history and cuisine, to "what’s growing in that field?"
You can learn, for instance, that those distinctive trees marking the Roman skyline, together with cypress trees, are umbrella pines. From them come the pine nuts used in pesto sauce and cookies. The poles in Venetian canals are often striped, as are the gondoliers’ shirts, to increase visibility in fog.
And Florence how much lovelier is Firenze can be an unusually hot city to walk around in because its thick, dark paving stones collect the sun’s heat all day, retaining much of it at night. Then, the next day they collect more heat, and so on. And the tiny sawed-off-looking Smart cars so prevalent in crowded Rome are the product of Swatch, Mercedes and Art.
You may yearn for the quiet town square and the cappuccino on many of the mornings when you must be up, re-packed, breakfasted and in the bus by 8 a.m. There’s no such thing as a sleep-in morning on tour.
But then, you’re assured entry to the Sistine Chapel, the Doge’s Palace or the Uffizi Gallery, and this or that "accademia" because of that early start coupled with the tour company’s clout for getting tickets. En masse can be a blessing especially when it obviates the wait of three-four hours that "independent travelers" can face.
The guide can be an excellent bridge to a foreign place, culture, language. A native-born, highly educated and multilingual Italian guide is a very lucky thing. To your delight, "Nicholas" speaks with personal experience about the country’s education system; he’s a natural to know his countrymen’s colorful foibles.
Most amazing perhaps, he’s fun. He interacts comfortably and smilingly with the mix of people on the tour bus; he knows the times for quiet and for comic relief and he doesn’t play favorites. In transit, it’s fun to hear his animated conversations in Italian with the bus driver, who is also pleasant and highly skilled at his job.
OK, so maybe you don’t spring up to take pictures of the flaming Tuscan steak platter when it’s carried in. But some do. Still others exclaim over accordion, flute and fiddle music during dinner and wandering tenors who make eyes at the older women as if for the first time.
The experience of eight days suggests that in Italy, all waiters and gondoliers are tenors and they all love their own voices.
All of which is to say that some parts of the tour can seem hokey or corny over the top or under the expectations. But most tour content, especially entertainment and even food, is probably aimed at the middle of the group. Any "majority of one" types can skip some group meals and eat on their own.
Traveling on tour means the responsibility for getting there and for everything running smoothly is all someone else’s and sometimes that’s the real vacation. Take accommodations, for instance: no worry about the condition of a rented car. Instead, there’s the cushy bus.
For a tour company to make it, hotels must be notable, offering the convenience and amenities whirlwind travelers must have. Occasionally, the hotel rises to the level of extraordinary, as happened in Venice when a luxury hotel opened up.
This meant for one couple a plushy room overlooking not merely a canal, but the Adriatic Sea. They slept with windows open and waves lapping right beneath them.
It’s sadly true that while touring you passed countless groves of olive trees, but never touched one. Nor could you find in those quick lunch stops at AutoGrill, a fresh-food chain that makes Turnpike fare look even worse the vaunted soap made with olive oil-of-the-country.
And there was little time for reflection en route: By day’s end, tourists could only fall into bed exhausted. ("No more steps please!") To pause and savor the wonders just seen would have meant missing the next site, or the bus.
But … looking back and collecting impressions was possible on the 10-hour flight home, then back in your own bed and your own world, as you filed trip materials and talked about it and looked over souvenirs and photos. You were amazed at all you’d done during those brief stops in Rome, Pisa, Florence, Verona and Venice.
"I’ve seen Michelangelo’s "David," the heroic figure he created in his 20s! I walked around inside the Roman Colosseum and have a sense of it now. I stood straight next to the leaning Tower of Pisa and learned the ‘news on the Rialto’ right there at the Rialto. And I dabbled my feet in the Adriatic Sea."
The anticipation of something, like travel or a birthday, can be better than the reality. But sometimes, the memory of that thing even a week later, once it’s over grows more golden every day. By now, for instance, that flying trip to Italian cities was in every way the grand tour!

