Be careful where you get your travel advice…and then blend it with a measure of your own exploration.
The digital spaces of the internet and social media are teeming with opinions and advice. While everyone has access to boast and post, my concern is that tastes in travel are decidedly not “one size fits all.” Neither are budgets, backgrounds or interests.
Some of the griping you also read may be unwarranted or due to a lack of context.
When friends come home from a vacation, they might tell you, “You’ve just gotta go!”
Similarly, sometimes people will recommend a television series or movie. “You have to see it: you’ll really love it” they insist, merely because they enjoyed it, without accounting for your tastes.
As a travel writer, I try to be thoughtful when I dispense advice. I love leading people to the best resources or connecting people with the contacts I have around the globe who will also direct them or even welcome them personally.
Expert companies such as Virtuoso Travel have connected me with advisors, ambassadors and providers in some of the most desirable and hidden exclusive corners of the world. They can help you be certain you spend your precious time carefully with the priceless return on investment of magic memories.
I despise the pompous term “influencer.” I am an advocate. Like Virtuoso Travel, I will give you tips and specifics and even suggest an itinerary, but also allow for the joy of your own discoveries along the way. Here are a couple of recent examples.
Doctor My Eyes Have Seen the Years
Lansing, Michigan’s Dr. John Wycoff, in a turnabout, asked me, his travel-writer patient, to prescribe something for him.
“Any advice for me during my upcoming four days in Paris?” the good doctor queried me.
“Lapin Agile,” I immediately answered. “The ‘Agile Rabbit.’”
I knew Wycoff and his wife Cindy would find all the obvious attractions of the City of Light. This includes the Eiffel Tower; Champs Elysees; Louvre Museum; Arc de Triomphe; Tuileries Gardens and what remains of the Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris along the River Seine.
Therefore, I prescribed an experience likely not on their list: Paris’s oldest bar, the Cabaret Au Lapin Agile – a historic, cultural landmark since 1860.
During my first visit to Paris, in 1994, I learned the Lapin Agile was an “academy of French song.” Riding a train back into town after an afternoon at Disneyland Paris, my then-wife Vera and I asked a local passenger to recommend a more authentic Parisian experience.
We were directed to sip sherry from small glasses in the quaint, tiny cottage that is Lapin Agile. Here we sat amidst its’ continuous performance, singing along to the traditional French drinking ditties, stirring musical homages to Edith Piaf, dramatic poetry readings and bon vivant humor decorated by paintings of famous murderers.
Historically, the dark cabaret was favored by luminaries, anarchists, assassins, artists, thieves, and writers including Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin. Faithfully, I returned each time I visited Paris, including, 15 years later, when I took our teenage son Harrison to Lapin Agile.
Five years later, during his subsequent foreign study, he, in turn, guided his college chums to the cabaret where they were warmly welcomed by the merry band of performers.
Lapin Agile is in Paris’s panoramic, Bohemian, scenic, artist’s 18th arrondissement of Montmartre. It is hidden behind a picturesque picket fence on the corner of a sidewalk stairway in the blessed shadow of the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur and yet still in the glow of the infamous “Red Light District.”
While the topless can-can dancers on stage at the brassy Moulin Rouge are iconic in a carnival kind of way, the little Lapin Agile is intimate in a different manner, more like an enchanting secret affair.
Shows start in a delightfully surprising manner at 9 p.m., but I tell patrons, such as the Wycoffs, they can drop in and out as they please throughout the evening.
Doctor, Doctor, Gimmie the News
I put no pressure on Wycoff to take my advice. But when he returned from his trip, I found that, on the final day of his Paris visit, he and his wife followed my “prescription.”
“Before arriving at Lapin Agile, Cindy and I randomly stopped for a bite in a gypsy-chic bistro called Rita’s,” Wycoff told me. “While we sipped our amazing French onion soup, a slender, tall, elderly Frenchman came in dressed in bright red velvet slacks, a white shirt with a frilly collar, and a black vest. He walked with a cane and a slight limp. We greeted him with a friendly, ‘Bon jour,’ as he sat down but then left him to enjoy his own soup.”
Wycoff recounted then seeing the frail Frenchman being assisted by a waiter when he slipped and nearly fell making his way out the door.
Later, seated at the cozy tables of Lapin Agile – mon dieu! – Wycoff recognized the show’s star singer. “The baritone was the elderly gentleman from Rita’s and turned out to be the current owner of the Lapin Agile. He winked at us, and we smiled back and toasted him. It was an evening we will not forget.”
Wycoff’s Lapin Agile experience was enhanced because his own discovery on the way, Rita’s Bistro, brought his adventure to life.
He Went to Paris
Knowing Dr. Wycoff as well as I do helped me offer him a suitable idea. A worthwhile travel planning company, such as Virtuoso Travel, and its members organizations such as IC Bellagio for Italy; Made for Spain and Portugal; or Luxury Slovenia, will take the time to learn about you, your family and your interests and desires.
“My wife Cindy was in Paris two months before I went with her and she and saw all the tourist attractions. Therefore, we had a more ‘eclectic’ trip around Paris in mind,” he told me. “We took a four-hour ‘Paris By Mouth’ tour that fed us the best croissant I have ever tasted, and some amazing cheeses and Patrick Roger chocolates.”
Wycoff said they met an amazing pastry chef and the tour concluded in a small wine shop where they dined in an underground cellar. “We drank some of the most amazing wines that have ever blessed my palate. And we got to sample food from three ‘meilleurs:’ best-in-class winners in Paris. The whole experience was truly astonishing.”
By this time, I was learning from Wycoff and getting hungry.
“The next day we took a cooking course with a Parisian chef named Martha. It was just the two of us starting the day at her downtown apartment,” Wycoff recalled. “She took us shopping at a local market and then with the fresh ingredients, prepared the most amazing meal of our lives: fresh cod with a mustard, wine, and curry sauce; wonderful carrots, green beans, local cheese, and a chocolate ganache dessert. It was ‘bon appetit.’”
Connection to Cucina Cuisine in Como
Photo by Harrison Shiels
Ironically, the aforementioned Vera Ambrose, the same week Wycoff was at Lapin Agile in Paris, was also taking some of my travel advice during her trip to Bellagio, on Como di Lago, in Italy.
She is an alum of East Lansing’s Michigan State University’s School of Hospitality and chef/owner of West Bloomfield’s Ambrosia Gourmet Catering. Therefore, I knew she would revel in a culinary experience at the intimate Ristorante Bilacus.
I arranged for her to meet the vibrant, entertaining chef and owner Aurelio “Gancio” Gandola. He and his mother Margherita operate the wildly popular Bilacus and Trattoria San Giacomo on Bellagio’s scenic Serbelloni steps overlooking Lake Como.
“Bilacus was soon bustling after we arrived at the noon opening and I loved every moment. The food was incredible and everything was amazing,” she told Gandola when she sent both he and I artistic follow-up photos of her meal. This included beef tartare with burnt oil and mustard mayonnaise as a first course; Sardinian gnocchi with lamb ragout “secondi;” and the fish that followed.
To complete the coincidental circle, Harrison, my son with Vera who accompanied me to Lapin Agile years after I had been there with her, lunched with me at Bilacus years before his mother did. We “discovered” Bilacus and scored a table, and met Gandola thanks to the expertise of the itinerary designers and guest ambassadors of the acclaimed IC Bellagio. This is a bespoke, international Italian tour company, which happens to be based in Bellagio.
Viva Rolando – Shoes on the Steps
IC Bellagio crafted an aquatic itinerary for Harrison and I to see the sights of Lake Como largely by boat. But before we boarded the water taxi after lunch to have an Aperol Spritz at the famed Grand Hotel Tremezzo, just as Wycoff “discovered” Rita’s Bistro, Harrison and I found the Rolando Shoe Store on the way down the Serbelloni steps to the dock.
Generations of the Rolando family have been crafting stylish shoes there since 1949, and the people in the store were so friendly and accommodating it was a memorable experience. Harrison and I felt splurging on shoes there would make the best Bellagio souvenir ever. From a country known for Prada, Gucci and Ferragamo shoes, we proudly wear our Rolandos.
The bottom line is to be careful when giving travel advice – not every experience is for everyone. And truly curate the travel tips you take from experts and connected friends who understand that.
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