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Charge of the Bus Brigade
"Where's my room?" is all one white-haired man can manage when I meet them in the lobby, brief them on the dinner schedule and take charge of their bags.
"Don't pay attention to anything anyone says on the first day," Banning says. "People haven't slept. They have eaten every single thing offered them and watched every movie. The first day is always the worst."
  Tour guide Rita Banning leads her charges on a 14-day "Magnificant Cities of Central and Eastern Europe" tour. (Steve Hendrix - Twp) |
I'm looking for someone to emerge as the group pill, but Banning tells me not to count on it.
"They say there's one in every group, but it's not true," she says. Only rarely does a serious carper sign up, someone who complains as a way of life or as a strategy for bagging refunds or discounts. "People pay a lot of money for these trips. They want to have a good time."
That they do is crucial to Banning, who depends on tips for about half of her income. She doesn't bring it up to guests (and is contemptuous of guides who let it be known that they'll gladly accept major credit cards), but the tour materials suggest $3 to $5 per day for both her and the driver. She is hardly ever stiffed, she said, although her gratuity envelopes often are the dumping ground for peoples' leftover forints, korunas and zlotys.
On this trip, she is a bit nervous that people won't like the location of the hotel, a leafy lakeside conference center far from the city center. This is one of Collette's midrange tours, running monthly through October and starting at $1,999 per person double occupancy. It features four-star hotels (in the European scale), sometimes more notable for their location than their plush appointments. Usually the groups start in downtown Berlin, but Germany is saturated with World Cup fans, and this is the only hotel available. A few people grumble that we're too far from "everything," but most seem happy enough to walk the trails and nap in the hours before our opening dinner.
The group, when it assembles in the dining room, is largely a clutch of hearty retirees. One extended family includes a twentysomething niece, but otherwise it's the heavily AARP crowd typical of international group travel. And they do seem like a bunch of bright-siders.
"Well, it's certainly beautifully striped," says an 81-year-old matron from Peoria, Ill., of an otherwise unexceptional hunk of grilled pork. Our food throughout Eastern Europe will consist largely of hearty and starchy hotel buffets and meals at high-volume "traditional" restaurants that cater to bus tours. People seem to approve, by and large, but I don't see anyone buying any local cookbooks.
The next morning they board the bus for the first time. Banning and I have placed name placards on the seats, assigning everyone a place that we will rotate daily. It's a strict Collette policy based on years of hassles with front-row hogs. "If you don't assign them, people will break their legs getting to the front seats," Banning says.
The driver, a mustachioed Austrian named Christian Stamfl, is Banning's favorite in Europe. She calls him "my Austrian son." A good driver, she says -- one who knows shortcuts and local customs -- is crucial. Guides still talk of the novice wheelman who made a wrong turn in Innsbruck and lodged his bus full of tourists in a narrow alley. But Stamfl whips the huge Volvo coach through our Berlin day tour like a moped. And as we race down the autobahn toward Potsdam, Banning stands at the front without fear. I surf the aisle selling water and Cokes for a euro each out of the bus cooler.
At Sans Souci, the rococo pleasure palace of Kaiser Frederick Wilhelm IV ("He could have done 'La Cage aux Folles' all by himself," Banning whispers in one of the more overwrought chambers), she is delighted to see how mobile our group is. Three women are already lagging badly, but Banning considers any group needing fewer than four wheelchairs a veritable track team. In fact, while I settle into the hotel bar to watch the United States get creamed in the World Cup, the two eldest women take an optional mile walk to a biergarten for dinner. Any ungenerous thoughts I've had about the softness of bus tourists fades when I see how these folks -- with numerous artificial knees and hips among them -- log the miles afoot.
Nap, Then Prague
We leave for the Czech Republic the next morning, and our days fall into a tolerably frantic routine: A travel day is followed by a full day in a city, including a driving tour narrated by a local guide, three or four stops at billboard palaces and cathedrals, and several hours of free time in the main shopping district. That's a fast pace by modern tour standards, which have mellowed considerably since the "If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium" days. Our own itinerary amounts to two nights each in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow and Warsaw.
