At the end of October 2022, we got the sad news that our long-time Vienna colleague, Claudia Prieler, had passed away. Claudia helped us start the Vienna UnTour in the late 1980s, making her our longest continually active UnTours representative. She met her last UnTourists in July 2022. One of her clients had a life-threatening…
On June 11, UnTours lost its long-time friend and colleague in Switzerland, Albert Greutert. Albert and his wife Berit were apartment hosts from the earliest years of UnTours in the 1970s. Berit, Albert’s vivacious wife, was one of our earliest Swiss UnTour staff persons. Albert was not content to let Berit have all the fun….
UnTours Swiss staff person Margrit Winterberger celebrated her retirement at the end of our 2019 season. UnTours president Brian Taussig-Lux joined her and other Swiss colleagues past and present for a retirement celebration this past fall. A tribute to Margrit Hal Taussig brought the first group of Americans to Switzerland in 1975. Margrit Winterberger started…
Maybe you have saved up for your UnTour. Surely you have shopped for the best airfare or used our services to help save you money. Everyone wants to stretch their travel dollar. Now how do you access money from Europe without paying exorbitant fees? Here are a dozen tips to help, from those of us…
How long does it take to build a basilica? On a recent trip to Barcelona, I learned that the Sagrada Familia Basilica is scheduled for completion in 2026, 144 years after construction began and 100 years after the death of its visionary architect, Antonio Gaudi. There is something about his joyous celebration of faith rooted…
What to do with a free afternoon in the pretty lakeside village of Sachseln? That’s the question I was confronted with recently, after a morning of apartment visits in nearby Lungern and Meiringen. Black clouds were threatening rain as I studied the bus and train schedules. Why do most visitors come to Sachseln? Aside from…
I don’t know much about whisky. At a tasting at a tiny Speyside distillery in the north of Scotland, I was glad I didn’t have to report on lingering sherry notes or hints of burnt licorice. The smoky peat flavors were about all my unsophisticated palate could detect. Though the tour did leave me…
It was a perfect day for a trip to the Isle of Skye, one of the best day trips in the Scottish Highlands. Cool temperatures, no rain in the forecast and a nearly cloudless sky. I had an ambitious itinerary of sights that I wanted to see, so I got an early start. I took…
Picture: Restoring a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail near Portland, OR during the 2015 B Corporation Champions Retreat. What is a B Corporation? You may have seen the logo in our catalog or on our website and wondered what it meant. After three days of connecting with hundreds of people from other B…
This piece originally ran in our UnTours Quarterly newsletter. (You can sign up for all of our newsletters here.) We got a lot of interesting comments from readers. We’ve included the best of them at the bottom of my post. After watching my own daughter’s obsession with the film in the years since I lived…