Holland, France, and England

Our first European garden tour! We started by flying directly to Amsterdam in Holland to visit the stunning flower market at Aalsmeer, the world class Keukenhof gardens and the beautiful city that is Amsterdam. Our tour operator was Globus with our European national guide was the wonderful Nico Spaarghan. We then ventured to the gardens of the north of France for several days before arriving for 4 nights in Paris. Chateau de Bagatelle, Palace of Versailles and Monet gardens were real highlight as well as being in the historic and atmospheric old city of Paris. Next we caught the Eurostar to London and visited gardens around the Lakes District, Cornwall and London before finishing with a visit to the 2008 Chelsea Flower Show.

---

China

This garden tour was designed to see the county and gardens with autumn foliage. Again China Travel Service provided the tour operation with a new national guide – Sonia. Sonia made the tour work smoothly and a few tears were shed at our farewell. We visited the usual highlights of China with the addition of an upstream Yichang to Chongqing Yangtze River cruise. The terrible earthquakes that rocked the Juizhaigou national park area in Sichuan forced a change of itinerary to again head down to Yunnan province to Kunming.  A smaller tour group of 16 had a great time as we experienced China in the post Olympic autumn of 2008.