While planning my next trip to Europe I've been poring through personal journals of past travels, guidebooks, travel periodicals and, most extensively, postings to this forum. A number of the Fodor postings have prompted some typically eccentric thoughts and questions in my mind. Are Murren, Wengen, Grindelwald and Zermatt all there is to experience in Switzerland? Has anyone gone to the Emmental or Ticino? Have travelers to Cinque Terre and Tuscany ever considered exploring Le Marche on Italy's Adriatic shores? Must a trip to Germany encompass the Rhine and Mosel Valleys and the Romantic Road? What about the Lahn River in Hesse and the Castle Road (Burgenstrasse) from Mannheim to Nuremberg? Is there anything in Belgium east of Brussels, Bruges and Ghent? What about the Ardennes? What do we find to be more adventurous - dining on escargot in Paris or bull sausage in the Camargue? What is our involvement with person-to-person interaction other than that with concierges, waiters, taxi and bus drivers, railroad ticket agents and conductors? Is Paris the "French experience" or is Billy-sur-Seine and Cambrai? Is New York the "American experience" or is Muleshoe, Texas and Hammond, Indiana? It's easy to find guide books that dwell on the Murrens, Tuscanys, Ghents and Romantic Roads of Europe; where are the guides to the non-tourist oriented spots in Europe? Just wondering while planning, planning, planning.

The guide to all those other paces is your own nose. <BR> <BR>And in many cases, there is some other written guide - - it might be two mimeographed pages stapled together, and perhaps, at the local library, no one has asked to see one for a year or more until you ask them if they will pull a copy out of the cardboard folder they keep them in. <BR> <BR>Lots of travelers discover these places, especially if they choose villa stays, rent cars or bicycles, and throw their other guidebooks away for a day. <BR> <BR>I've got a list of little towns and often isolated restaurants, but it wouldn't mean much to anyone else. It probably wouldn't even mean all that much to me a second time around. It was the smell of the soup that day - - something I had just seen, a map finally figured out. You had to be there right then to know why it was special - - right then. <BR> <BR>Otherwise, most of the time, Hammond, Indiana is just Hammond, Indiana.

Dear Wes, <BR> <BR>Yes, of course there's something east of Brugge, Brussels and Gent: the city is called Antwerp. Foreigners seem to know only about Brugge (which is far overrated in my humble opinion). Antwerp is known for its world harbour, its diamond centre, it has a beautiful ancient quarter, good shopping facilities with luxury boutiques in the narrow cobblestoned streets, great restaurants and cafés. Only 20 min. by train or bus brings you into the most beautiful nature of a the natural reserve "Kalmthoutse Heide" (where I live nearby). Antwerp has also good train connections to all other Belgian and Dutch/German/French cities. <BR> <BR>The Ardennes, the southern part of Belgium, are also great to visit, especially for walking or biking. There are lovely small cities like Durbuy (the smallest city in Belgium), Eupen (in the German speaking part), etc. etc. Although it is also in Belgium, the Ardennes are totally different, also the mentality of the inhabitants. The climate is a bit rougher, so are the people, so is the style of their houses. <BR>Try it Wes, you won't regret it ! You may always contact me if you want more info.

Your ability to visit 'out of the way' or 'off the beaten track' places is largely dependent on the amount of time and money you have to blow on your holiday or other travels. Most people have a limited amount of time available and tend to spend it travelling well trodden paths to the conventional sights. Some places seem to have a 'must see' quality, if I were to visit Paris I'd probably see the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame etc before spending time in more obscure parts of town. Quite why I'd feel I'd have missed out if I'd not seen some of these places is not entirely clear to me but there seems to be some kind of peer pressure to 'do' these sort of sites. In cities like Istanbul, which I know well and have visited often, I can afford to to get off the main drag and venture into the back streets, sometimes for their own sake and special atmosphere (in my opinion, crowded and smelly in other's opinions) and sometimes to visit some tiny tiled mosque John Feely has enjoyed and written up in The Blue Guide. I'd still recommend visitors to spend their limited time visiting the standard sites first, the Aya Sophia, Blue Mosque and Topkapi are beautiful places and easily accessible. <BR> <BR>Opportunity plays an important part as well. When my family invaded Provence some years ago we had a couple of days to spare. The holiday home booking ran from the first of the calendar month and we travelled over the bank holiday weekend which gave us a couple of days to kill. My brother said it was entirely my choice where we stopped so long as it was on the way and close to one of a particular chain of motels. I looked at the map and not one to let an opportunity pass opted for Beaujolais. I'm a great fan of the 'cru' Beaujolais (Julianus, Fleurie, Moulin a Vent etc.) and wanted to visit the villages and area where they were made, a pilgrimage if you like. We spent the first day ambling down from Calais and the next driving round the Beaujolais villages knocking on farmhouse doors and tasting, sometimes buying, their wines. I was in seventh heaven despite the weather being a little chilly and the rain torrential, what the others in the car felt is to this day a closely kept secret. Like the Burgundy countryside, of which Beaujolais is an offshoot, the area is pretty but has little to offer tourists except the wine and endless vines. There is a tall hill from the top of which you are supposed to be able to see the Alps, on the day we were there it rained so hard you could barely see across the road. We went off to Provence the next day and spent two weeks visiting all the usual sights (oh, and I couldn't resist a visit to Chateau Neuf du Pape!). <BR> <BR>Independent travel to out of the way regions can be a great time sink unless you are superbly organised. When a friend and I went to visit Nemrut Dagi in the east of Turkey we spent the best part of two weeks of our three week trip getting there and back. This was mainly the fault of our rather ad hoc organisation. We spent a couple of days in Istanbul and on to Ankara to visit a friend. In Ankara we booked a flight to Malatya but flights were only a couple of times a week and we had a couple of days to kill. Luckily our friend was amenable and we spent a couple of days pottering around Ankara. Malatya, it turns out, was simply a Turkish military airbase which a couple of times a week opens its runway to the Turkish Airlines flight to/from Ankara. Security is the equal of any other Nato airbase (maybe more, being just a few interceptor minutes from the Soviet border) and we were escorted to the Turkish Airlines bus and off the base by armed guards, certainly a different experience. Malatya was only half the journey, that afternoon we pressed on to Adiyaman which is the nearest sizeable town to Nemrut Dagi. It took another couple of days to organise and take an excursion to the mountain. We were left with several days to kill before our next date with a week long ferry trip from Mersin to Istanbul. It was too short a time to visit anywhere we knew about and too early to arrive in Mersin. We pressed on to Mersin in the hope there'd be something to do nearby. Mersin is the most humid place in the world, laying on the bed in an air conditioned hotel room thinking about moving is enought to bring you out in a sweat. There isn't a great deal to see, though last time I was there were building a mosque which I'm sure they are proud of, and along the way we picked up a bug which made us very miserable, so bad my friend actually spent a night in the local hospital having his tanks topped up (travel tip: the doctor recommended warm flat Coke, the drink not the white powder, to maintain body fluids after he was discharged as its sterile and contains sugar and some useful minerals). On another trip we were 'stranded' in Konya for 24 hours by a combination of bad planning, a delayed bus and bad connections. We discovered that Konya, which wasn't on our itinerary, was a jewel. In that part of the world this is 'kismet' (fate). <BR> <BR>As for interacting with locals, there's a big gap between learning the phrase to order a beer and holding even the simplest of conversations in a foreign language. Hopefully most of us try the former but few of us are capable of the latter. Maybe English is such an easy and lazy language that us native English speakers lack the mental capacity to get our heads around a more strictly structured language or maybe we're just lazy. All too often the phrase 'Bana cay lutfen' elicits the reply 'One tea, OK sir' which tends to put you off trying, though people do appreciate the effort. Often when trying to converse with the locals they are more willing to practice their, often very acceptable, English rather than suffer your rape of their tongue, however much they appreciate the gesture.

Hi Wes: I agree, almost all of the questions I have answered about Switzerland seem to focus onthe Berner Oberland. But, the answer to the question about Switzerland is a resounding NO!! There is a heck of a lot more to see than just Grindelwald and the north face of the Eiger. <BR>I grant you that the Berner Oberland is mentioned heavily because it is so accessible and so heavily advertised and promoted. People who consider going to Switzerland get bombarded with Berner Oberland advertising. The attractions are great and the advertising presses home the point. I think that is the main reason so many people go there. I guess in the days of the Roman Empire, one could say that all roads lead to Rome. Today, it seems like many of the roads in Switzerland lead to the Berner Oberland -- at least the tour buses seem to congretate in Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald. <BR> <BR>We went initially to Lauterbrunnen because (1) I could find a good place to stay for a week at reasonable cost and (2) it is very, very beautiful in that area, when the sun shines. One cannot deny the spectacular aspects of that mountain range. <BR> <BR>This past September, on our return journey, we went first from Lausanne to Zinal in Val d'Anniviers, south of Sion. Truly beautiful. We found friendly people at the Hotel du Trift -- folks we could talk to. The owner Nicholas Guillhaume prefers to speak English rather than German, as does his wife. (I don't speak French.) They seem to welcome the chance to practice their English with a couple of willing guests. Not many Americans go to Zinal, so I think they were also curious about us and how we selected their hotel. The chief waitress, desk clerk, baggage carrier, bar tender, etc. named Kirsten spoke good high German (not one of those Swiss dialects), so she and I could converse, as long as we stayed away from complex subjects like social questions and the Euro. <BR> <BR>In the summer of '98 we went to Saas Grund where we rented an apartment from a non-English speaking family and had a good time. My German got me by and I even served as intermediary in a conversation between my wife and our landlady, Frau Zurbriggen. While there we explored Saas Fee and other villages in the Saaser Visper valley. Naturally we hiked a few trails above Saas Fee, with that awesome glacier and the giants of the Mischabel Range ever present. <BR> <BR>One rainy day this past summer we headed out to see what we could find in Canton Bern. We ended up in a little village called Afolten, east of Bern, for a tour of a cheese factory. The tour was narrated in several languages. Fortunately, we arrived just in time to watch a cow judging contest as they awarded those huge bells as prizes. Being an old farm boy, I enjoyed seeing those beautiful milk cows. All of them prize beauties. Then we swung over to the Brunig Pass to return to Interlaken. That route took us through some beautiful pasture land and forested areas. <BR> <BR>And let us not leave out those spectacular passes of Grimsel and Sustern that lead over the alps east of Interlaken and take you to the Valley the Rhone. <BR> <BR>So the answer, as you well know, is there is a lot to Switzerland other than the Berner Oberland. (And I did not even mention our trip to Luek and getting drowned in the rain on the Gemmi Pass at the Daubensee or our trek to the Oeschinensee near Kandersteg. As you read, I wrote a lot about Switzerland without even mentioning the beautiful scenery around Zermatt!! I will save that for round 2.) <BR>

The reason tourist attractions are tourist attractions is...they attract tourists. Everyone wants to see the Eiffel Tower because..it's the Eiffel Tower. A friend I visited on my first trip to San Francisco said in response to my "I'm sorry I want to do all the touristy things".."Don't be sorry, the reason they are touristy is they are FUN and I like to do them too!". So there's nothing to be sorry for or rue if you stick to the 'tourist sites' on your first few trips. I STILL like to go to the tippy top of the Eiffel Tower, even after several trips to it. Of course, I also liked the Cooking Traditions from Around the World that was at the Museum of Man at the Chaillot (which I visited on my "not-so-popular museums with cool stuff" tour a couple of years ago). <BR>What pleases people can be pretty diverse, but everyone can find something in the Louvre (even my sister, who HATES museums, loved all the old dug up stuff). On the other hand, the Coin Museum doesn't appeal to everyone. The Blarney Stone and Castle have universal appeal; the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge is a bit more specialized. <BR>Certain interests will lead you to off-the-wall places; if you aren't a Piaf fan, you wouldn't read the article about her in the local newspaper that mentioned the her museum in Paris; Van Gogh leads you to the Kroller-Mueller Museum in the middle of a game park; interest in unusual food leads you to the Chestnut Tour. <BR>Movies drive you to unusual locations: Ever After was filmed in and around several Dordogne castles whose names were given in the credits; if we hadn't seen the movie to see the castles to get their names, we would not have known to visit them; the Jewel in the Nile brought us to Morocco. <BR>Lots of finds in NON-travel publications: W gave me a list of off-the-beaten-path Parisian restaurants; Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines have done the same for other cities, as well as out-of-the-way shops and markets; decorating magazines have given me gardens, baronial manors, and architectural sights to search out. <BR>Then there's the wandering; the museum is closed because a pipe burst, so you wander the neighborhood instead. Or the road is closed, so you take a detour and end up in a little border town between France and Spain. <BR>As for the locals, you need to be a bit of an extrovert. People talk to people who look like they want to be talked to (sorry about the dangling); Americans, I think, are perceived as outgoing, so we are approached for conversation (the Loons attract little old ladies and small children). I have a map of Pere Lachaise that's been on every trip for the last 11 years - and, inevitably, someone sees me peering at it, and asks "ou est Edith Piaf? Simone Signoret?" (usually mature French women ask these) and off we go. If you are accessible, you'll be accessed. <BR> <BR>And, as I've discovered through this Forum and in discussions with other travelers - reading reading reading. People who like to read seem to like to travel, and vice versa, so lots of places that are off the beaten path are found in books, newspaper and magazine articles, etc. <BR> <BR>

Hi! Just read your e-mail and the responses. YES! there is life beyond those places you mentioned. We have visited the Ardennes many years ago as well as Luxembourg. Enjoyed that part of Europe very much. We have spread our wings the past 7 yrs and ahve explored the Dolomites in Northern Italy, as well as the Tirol region. Bolzano and Merano are two nice cities in the region. Going further afield, have you been to Slovenia across which is very close to Triest Italy. The town of Piren on the Adriatic Sea is a very nice place to stay. The Adriatic is so clear. We stayed at a hotel with a nice balcony painted white with tiles. Many Italians live in that part of Slovenia, very good Italian restaurants and the sea is so nice. Slovenia itself is something to see, off the beaten path abit. We have been exploring Czech Rep, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland etc. It is here when you are in a small town and you hear no English, the people are friendly and the hotels are up to the standards I expect, that it hits me that there is more to see than western Europe. enjoy alan <BR>