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There are bird-watching tours, famous-garden tours and even trips arranged by half a dozen organizations in England that allow a privileged few tourists a chance to stay in stately homes with their titled occupants. For $90 a night, the venerable Lady Heald of Chilworth Manor, a converted 11th century monastery, will entertain and dine with a couple. Car buffs can arrange visits to the Mercedes, Lamborghini, Ferrari and BMW factories and the antique-car museums of Europe. The cost for that is about $2,900 for two weeks (airfare included), but the participant can save $4,000 by buying a Mercedes overseas and bringing it back to the U.S. The demand for deluxe travel is as lusty as ever. Says Atlanta Travel Agent Phil Osborne: "People are buying the Orient Express from London to Venice like popcorn. That's $550 for 24 hours on an old, refurbished train, not including meals. Yet we can't get enough seats."
Major religious celebrations this year include the Vatican's Holy Year of Redemption, which extends through next Easter, and Martin Luther's 500th birth day. Lufthansa and several travel agents and religious organizations have planned a series of tours tracing Luther's life. One of the most recondite cultural vacations available is a 27-day Plantagenet tour of medieval England and France, a $3,945 trip arranged and led by Peter Gravgaard, a Danish citizen who has taught literature in the U.S. and Europe.
Music tours are among this year's biggest attractions. Dailey Thorp Travel, a Manhattan agency that handles only musical vacations, has had a 30% increase in bookings over the past year; virtually all of its nine European tours are sold out, even though they are all first class at premium prices. A popular novelty this year is what Dailey Thorp calls the Cultural Blitz Tour, a three-day weekend of cultural events in Europe. These tours, the agency's Don Fannon explains, "appeal to a lot of professional people who can afford to take one or two days off from work, but not a whole week." More Americans than ever are attracted to train travel: an American Express rail tour of Europe is sold out; at least 10% more vacationers have bought Eurailpass.
Earthwatch, a nonprofit scientific research organization based in Belmont, Mass., will send 625 vacationers on expeditions that include a probe of 90-gun H.M.S. Coronation, which sank off Plymouth in 1697, and a dig for Bronze Age artifacts along the Esk River on the Scottish border. Virtually every European country offers at least two or three music festivals, and almost everywhere, every week, there are rumbustious folk festivals, with such attractions as jousting knights, wrestling Tyroleans, strawberry-eating contests, battling bargemen and tootling bands. A country-by-country summary of seasonal highlights: