Travel
In reply to the discussion: Air travel hints and helps [View all]CTyankee
(63,903 posts)Both were great. Sicily is quite beautiful, esp. Taormina
That's Mt. Etna rising in the background (going up Etna can be dicey...I know from experience!). Also, Palermo is a world class city and Siricusa (an old Greek city) is facinating. We had great food and the history is just fabulous. Just avoid Catania if possible...but do go up into the Madone mountains. Sicily is greatly underrated by U.S. tourists for some reason.
Lake Maggiore is lovely. It was a memorable visit on a trip to northern Italy that I took in 2008. I was bent on eating that region's dish, Ragu Bolognese, so I had it in every town/city I stopped in. The Italian Riviera was a disappointment to me; however, Verona more than made up for that...gorgeous city that I thought would be too trite (I anticipated that I would hate Juliet's house because I deemed it "touristy" but I fell in love with the place!). Venice was mobbed, so that detracted from my enjoyment...and who knew that the Po River overflowed in early May, making the Piazza San Marco a wading pool at noontime...
I adored Spain's food...it was very fresh and good. I went to Bilbao to see how Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum transformed that old, rather gritty industrial Basque town, another place not a lot of tourists visit. I may go Barcelona and Valencia with my dtr and granddtr, TBD, to visit the City of Arts and Sciences and eat paella. And you can't find a better coffee drink than the cortado...
I've been traveling with Road Scholar for a while now. They are an offshoot of elderhostel and go places that most travel companies don't offer and plenty of bike tours. Here is their hiking trip to the Loire valley region http://www.roadscholar.org/n/program/summary.aspx?id=1-795L9Z
I missed out on cinque terre (long story) but would like to go back before I get too old and fall apart...