Anyone Taken a Bus Tour

Jules

Jules

SF VIP
We’re thinking of taking a bus tour. Just looked at a few itineraries. The provincial ones are places we’ve been so a short test run for a few days isn’t too appealing based on the prices.

I’m not sure if this is for us. We’re not early morning people so being showered, dressed, fed and on the road by 9 AM may not be an enjoyable vacation. I don’t know any of these details yet so don’t want to rule it out.
 

Jules said:
We’re thinking of taking a bus tour. Just looked at a few itineraries. The provincial ones are places we’ve been so a short test run for a few days isn’t too appealing based on the prices.

I’m not sure if this is for us. We’re not early morning people so being showered, dressed, fed and on the road by 9 AM may not be an enjoyable vacation. I don’t know any of these details yet so don’t want to rule it out.
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oh goodness I agree with Bowmore. If the American bus tours are anything like the UK.. you have to be up at the crack of dawn,, eat brekkie in a hurry, and be back on that bus.. ... and when you've done all that.. there's always one couple , who keeps the bus waiting for about 1/2 hour past it's departure time..because the rules don't apply to them...

Not for me.. did them years ago.. bus tours to Europe.. ( Paris, Belgium etc)
 
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Jules said:
We’re thinking of taking a bus tour. Just looked at a few itineraries. The provincial ones are places we’ve been so a short test run for a few days isn’t too appealing based on the prices.

I’m not sure if this is for us. We’re not early morning people so being showered, dressed, fed and on the road by 9 AM may not be an enjoyable vacation. I don’t know any of these details yet so don’t want to rule it out.
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Boy are you in for a rude awakening. On many bus tours they want your bags out by 7 AM and on the bus by 8 to 8:30
 

I have to agree with others, my late husband and I went on a 10 day fall foliage trip in the Northeast....it was a nightmare....the bus broke down, we sat on the side of the road for hours waiting for a replacement....not only did we have to be up very early but we had to pack a small bag for one change of clothes for the next day so they did not have to take the larger bags off the bus.
I had been on long bus tours in Europe and don't remember any problems but this Fall Foliage was not a good experience.
 
Pinky said:
I wonder if there is a similar travel package via train?
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I looked at that one too. $22K+. It has pros and cons. When we had a full day excursion in New Zealand, I was really ready to get off after 14 hours.
 
I've been on two bus tours that I can remember, and enjoyed both.

One was a Perrillo tour of Italy. It covered the whole country, stopped at all the famous places and some that were beautiful but not so famous, and stayed for a few days each in Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples, and Milan. The tour took about two weeks.

The other was a small group (14 tourists plus three very knowledgable guides) that started in London and took us to Cornwall, where we spent a week. We stayed in marvelous hotels, off the beaten path. For instance, one had actually been a castle. And we visited Doc Martin's house and the pharmacy in "Portwenn," which is really Port Isaac. Wonderful trip, possibly the best of my life.
 
I will tell you what we have been doing. We find a tour itinerary that we like and then do it ourselves. This worked great in Switzerland and in New Mexico.
In fact, we used the Tauck itinerary in New Mexico. We had lunch at a nice restaurant in Chimayo, and were about ready to leave, when the Tauck tour bus pulled in. I turned to my wife and said,"I wonder how long it will take them to get fed".
 
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bowmore said:
I will tell you what we have been doing. We find a tour itinerary that we like and then do it ourselves. This worked great in Switzerland and in New Mexico.
In fact, we used the Tauck itinerary in New Mexico. We had lunch at a nice restaurant in Chimayo, and were about ready to leave, when the Tauck tour bus pulled. I turned to my wife and said,"I wonder how long it will take them to get fed".
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we used to do that very thing in Spain.. we once took a tour bus to see some mountainous area.. and there was some gorgeous mountain restaurants.. but all the coaches stopped there as their lunchtime stop.... so after the first and only time we took the coach, ever after that we drove ourselves to that mountain restaurants and always got there before the coaches and watched as they all piled off the buses , and took a long time to get sat down with their food..
 
I took my first bus tour in Ireland and really enjoyed it. We stayed 2 nights in each place and didn’t get on the bus in the morning until 9 so we would get up at 7:30 and have plenty of time to get ready and have breakfast. We showered the night before and put our bags out at 8 am. All the hotels had buffets so breakfast was fast.
 
My son and his wife vacationed in Italy this year....two weeks, I think. They reserved 2 bus tours. During the first one, they stuck with the program all the way through and it was pretty enjoyable, they said. But for the second one, they hired their own personal guide, a guy who gives tours for a living. They preferred the second tour by quite a margin. Their guide gave way more history and lots of little-known details about the sites, showed them a bunch of cool stuff that the bus's tour guide ignored, and suggested better restaurants because he bothered to ask them particular Qs about foods they like and described each restaurant's fare vividly. They said his fee was way less than they expected to pay, and they got more than their money's worth.

So, that's how they do it in Italy, apparently.
 
Yes. Bus tours of Greece and Turkey and several in outback Australia.
I even fronted up for a bus tour to Ayers Rock (now referred to as Uluru) with three nuns and 43 adolescent school students. We camped in 4 man tents every night. Now that was the bus trip from hell, but a good memory, nevertheless.

I have also been on several small plane tours; one across northern Australia (known as the Top End) and another to Papua New Guinea. You can cover a lot more territory in a small plane than you can by road. This is a plus when there is nothing but desert and spinifex to look at for hours on end from the bus.
 
I was home in Ohio on leave when I ran into an old female classmate. After we had talked for maybe 20 minutes, she said she was going on a bus trip on Saturday to the Ohio Zoo. She said her partner backed out, but was looking for someone to go along. It sounded pretty nice, so I agreed to go.

The Zoo was great, the bus trip was fine because we talked a lot catching up, but the people were so slow getting on and off the bus, the “snacks” they served on the bus was a huge let down. We had animal crackers and a cup of juice. This was an adults only trip sponsored by a church. We stopped for lunch before we got to the zoo at a Cracker Barrel, which is not one of my favorite restaurants and then dinner on the way home at a Western Sizzler, which was fine. We weren’t at the zoo very long. Only about 4 hours. But, I swore off bus trips after that. They passed a box through the bus to collect tips and I put some money in along with a note saying, “I don’t know how you tolerate doing this job every weekend, but God Bless You.
 
We would stay in a hotel and take local one day tours, worked well. We visited Tangier, Granada, Gibraltar on our trip to Spain. In Australia we went by train from Melbourne to Sydney by train and then flew to Cairns where we snorkled on the Barrier reef. In Costa Rica we went up to the top of a volcano, down to a banana plantation and around San Jose the same way.
 
Manatee said:
We would stay in a hotel and take local one day tours, worked well. We visited Tangier, Granada, Gibraltar on our trip to Spain. In Australia we went by train from Melbourne to Sydney by train and then flew to Cairns where we snorkled on the Barrier reef. In Costa Rica we went up to the top of a volcano, down to a banana plantation and around San Jose the same way.
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Surely you went on a boat (Ferry) to Tangier from The southern tip of Spain.. :D I've done that trip myself, from the Costa del Sol.....drove to the port and got a ferry to Tangier.. drove to Gibralter myself from the Cota Del Sol... and 3 times drove myself to Granada.. twice from The Costa Del Sol.. and once from the Costa Blanca.. that was 6 hours... .. never taken a coach to any of those places.. but I did take a coach within the Costa Blanca to the mountains..
 
England, Ireland and Scotland with a bus group. Hurt my leg going down 5 flights of stairs to get down to the bus when the ferry was ready to disembark and leg has never been the same. The other frustration was the pacing up every night so bags could be gathered at 6 AM outside my room.
 
One of my gripes is the amount of time it takes to load and unload the bus. If you figure an average of 30 seconds a person, it takes 20 minutes to load or unload a 40 passenger bus.
If you have multiple stops, it really adds up. And you always have one or two that are habitually late.
What we discovered while on a cruise, you can go to Cruisecritic, look for your specific cruise, and see if anyone is putting together a small group tour. We did this in Lisbon and Lima, among other places. These tours are for around 8 people in a small bus, and can be customized.
 

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