Tours

“ All its alleys and gardens are flat and formal, and all in the midst of the town itself, surrounded by colossal houses, and only bounded by a thick clayey river, which it is unpleasing for the eye to rest upon.
The sight of several of the most admired and important towns in France, has reconciled me, in [320] a singular degree, with that of Tours, whose fame appeared to me, when I first saw it, to be undeserved. I judged, as one accustomed to English splendour, and English neatness, and I scarcely gave Tours all the credit it deserved. ”

“ For first tours it may be needful and pleasant to have all made easy, to be carried in steamers or railways like a parcel, to stop at hotels Anglified by the crowd of English guests, and to ride, walk, or drive among people who know already just what you will want to eat, and see, and do. ”

“ HITTING THE TRAIL WALKING tours are popularly supposed to be feasible chiefly for those to whom this method of travel is incidental to their occupation—timber cruisers, landlookers, prospectors, game wardens and trappers of the North—men who daily match themselves against the forces of Nature. ”

“ Let them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who knows what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?
WALKING TOURS
It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. ”

“ They are cold and musty indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all apartments should be through which [71] the insatiate American wanders in the rear of a bored domestic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry or to read the name on the frame of some simpering portrait.
To return to Tours my companion and I had counted on a train which (as is not uncommon in France) existed only in the "Indicateur des Chemins de Fer;" and instead of waiting for another we engaged a vehicle to take us home. ”

“ Its purpose is to save the intending Tourist time and trouble and to generally assist him in mapping out his tour, free of charge and irrespective of the make of tyres he uses.
The latest information relating to Tours, in any part of the World, can be furnished.
If you are unable to pay a visit to this office, send us a rough draft of your next proposed tour, and we will prepare a complete and detailed Itinerary and forward it to you by return of post. ”

“ Few people but have laid out skeleton tours through its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand of merely mundane travels, one element of attraction has always consisted in the possible revision of one's routes. ”

“ Excursion Steamers. Many of the above companies and others besides organize Mediterranean cruises and circular tours at very reasonable fares, whereby everything is made easy and comfortable; but the 2more enterprising and independent traveller will greatly prefer to piece his tour together for himself, combining the various routes to suit his own convenience, and often lingering for days in profoundly impressive historic places or amid glorious scenery, where the hurriedly conducted tourist can spend a few hours only. ”

“ Tours was beloved by French royalty. It was the capital of a province as rich as it was beautiful. Among French provinces Touraine was always the aristocrat. Its language has been kept pure. To this day the purest French in the world is spoken at Tours. The mechanic who made some repairs for me at the garage leaned on the mud guard, during a [Pg 261] brief intermission of that hottest of days, and told me about the purity of the French at Tours ”

“ Many houses were filled with visitors the greater part of the year, usually remaining two or three weeks. Visiting tours were made in our private carriages—each family making at least one such tour a year. Nor was it necessary to announce these visits by message or letter, each house being considered always ready, and “entertaining company” the occupation of the people. ”

“ Tours also possesses an excellent English boarding house; and elegant houses, villas and châteaux, well furnished, are to be readily obtained in the town and its environs. All kinds of provisions are exceedingly plentiful, which with the numerous fruits and wines are to be obtained at very moderate prices. ”

“ The attendance at baths, the rise of summer resorts and air-cures, and furloughs for all classes of officers, have become regular institutions, while they were formerly indulged only in cases of sickness; and the excursions of school vacations, the pleasure-trains and the extra trains on holidays, long wedding tours, excursion parties to foreign lands, or around the world, are evidences of the taste for traveling that modern men feel, and of the ease with which it is gratified. ”

“ Tours contains a fine cathedral, also the remains of what must have been a still finer one—two noble towers, so widely separated by streets and buildings that it is hard to imagine them ever having belonged to one structure. ”

“ I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the frequent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town crier. ”

“ And in these days when, what with railways, through-tickets, and Cook’s and other guides for timid tourists, the journey from one end of Europe to the other is made so quickly and so cheaply as to be within most educated men’s reach, it is no wonder if most of us in our turn make the venture. ”

“ We later sons of time have, both for our pleasure and our pain, invented the fashion of special terms, and I am afraid that even common decency obliges me to pay some larger tribute than this to the architectural gem of Touraine. Fortunately I can discharge my debt with gratitude. In going from Tours you leave the valley of the Loire and enter that of the Cher, and at the end of about an hour you see the turrets of the castle on your right, among the trees, down in the meadows, beside the quiet little river. ”

“ The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. ”

“ It is a tour which embraces country widely differing in characteristics—one which takes in both the long, broad, ribbon-like roads of Central France, flanked by meadows, orchards, and farmsteads, and lofty mountains from the peaks of which other peaks capped with glistening snow may be gazed upon, sunlit valleys and sparkling lakes. It is a tour which no man could possibly make without a good machine, and yet it is a tour which, with a good machine, can be considered easy and comparatively inexpensive. ”

“ Occasionally, walking trips, with one or two companions, gave well-deserved vacations—trips from which the walkers returned tired and penniless, but inspired by the beauty of nature in the pleasant French countryside and thrilled with the stupendous grandeur of the Alpine scenery. ”

“ This form of locomotion, in the country of the amenities, is attended with a dozen discomforts; almost all the conditions of the business are detestable. They force the sentimental tourist again and again to ask himself whether, in consideration of such mortal annoyances, the game is worth the candle. Fortunately a railway journey is a good deal like a sea-voyage; its miseries fade from the mind as soon as you arrive. That is why I completed, to my great satisfaction, my little tour in France. ”

“ A tour in Europe, carefully mapped out with an elaborate itinerary and a carefully connected timetable, may be full of instruction, but it often becomes a tax upon the spirit and a weariness to the flesh. ”

“ Should you wish merely to make a rapid tour of the mountain region, it will be best so to arrange your route before starting that the first day will bring you where there is something to be seen, to a comfortable hotel, and from which your journey may be continued with an economy of time and money. ”

“ The lines of travel chosen are such as will give the tourist the most favorable opportunities for visiting the celebrated summer resorts en route, and secure the advantages of palace coaches, dining cars, quick transit, and sure connections,—considerations which combine to make a journey enjoyable, and by means of which a trip becomes a luxury as a means as well as an end. ”

“ For two miles the pathway is a lofty terrace, cut in the face of the mountain for the course of the aqueduct, from which, beneath overhanging trees, you look up on one side, upon steep rocks and wild woods, and down on the other, as from the parapets of a lofty castle, upon a succession of views of cultivated and surprising beauty. ”

“ Even in our time the old type is not altogether extinct, and may be occasionally encountered in a railway carriage or at a mountain inn, but it is daily becoming more rare.
Our main theme is, then, the touring of Englishmen upon the Continent of Europe in the eighteenth century. Practical considerations of space, as well as the actual practice of all but an insignificant fraction of tourists, compel us to limit our view to France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries. ”

“ I judged it best to go to bed and rest several days, for I knew that the man who undertakes to make the tour of Europe on foot must take care of himself.
Thinking over my plans, as mapped out, I perceived that they did not take in the Furka Pass, the Rhone Glacier, the Finsteraarhorn, the Wetterhorn, etc. I immediately examined the guide-book to see if these were important, and found they were; in fact, a pedestrian tour of Europe could not be complete without them. ”

“ We need to know of the means of travel, of the state of the roads and where they ran, of the inns and how one fared in them, of fashionable society and how it impressed the tourist, as well as the impression the tourist made upon society: in short, in so far as is possible in a book that must touch many things lightly if at all, we must endeavor to follow the tourist from place to place and see with him some of the sights that most interested him. ”

“ Such an informal and unusual way of wandering puts you as a rule on a friendly, companionable footing with everybody you meet: people take an interest in your journey, they confide in you and you in them, there is a sort of freemasonry about the road that has its attractions, you seem to belong to the countryside, to be a part and parcel of your surroundings for the time being, in strong contrast with the stranger suddenly arriving by the railway from somewhere far away. He is brought, the driving tourist comes—a distinction with a difference! ”

“ Our tour was an unqualified success. A more delightfully independent, a more restful, or a more remunerative way of seeing the country than by driving through it, without haste or any precisely arranged plan, it is difficult to conceive, ensuring, as such an expedition does, perfect freedom, and a happy escape from the many minor worries of ordinary travel—the only thing absolutely needful for the driving tourist to do being to find an inn for the night. ”

“ If ever twelve days seem long to a man, it is during his first voyage across the Atlantic; and the real beauty of green grass is best appreciated by seeing it on the shores of Queenstown as the steamer sails into Cork harbor.
Land again! How well we all are! A sea voyage,—it is nothing. Every one who is going ashore here is in the bustle of preparation.
We agree to meet A and party in London; we will call on B in Paris,—yes, we shall come across C in Switzerland. How glib we are talking of the old country! ”

“ The traveller may cast himself at length under the first tree that invites him, and repose there as safely as if he were in a palace. Fearless of damps, and unmolested by noxious insects, his sleep is as sound as it is refreshing, and he rises with renewed spirits to pursue his journey. ”

“ Travel was regarded as an essential finish of one's education, whether one traveled alone or with a tutor. The fashion of travel once established, it often tempted men, and even women, of mature years to undertake extended journeys. The itinerary, of course, varied somewhat according to personal tastes and special needs, but in general the regions visited by tourists bom on the Continent were substantially the same as those that attracted Englishmen. ”

“ Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook ”

“ The attractions of the natural scenery of the East are of themselves sufficient to call to them annually thousands of tourists, who, independently of the causes already mentioned, occupy their “summer vacations” with an Eastern tour simply for the enjoyment of the attractions presented in the way of pleasant routes of travel, and the scenery to be enjoyed on the way or at the objective point of the journey. ”

“ While American tourists are delightedly visiting and minutely describing the most hidden recesses of beauty among the mountains, plains, seas, lakes, and rivers of Europe, there are, close within their reach, innumerable spots well worthy of consideration, and hitherto entirely unknown to the great mass of pleasure and scenery seeking travellers. ”

“ There is no feeling in the world so exhilarating and delicious as that experienced in starting off on a Bohemian tour, without luggage, without responsibilities, unhampered by fear of railway time-tables or the care of boxes, dawdling or hurrying at will, starting at what hour one pleases, and out all day in the fresh mountain air, with al fresco meals and a turf siesta. ”