Thomas Randall, European Tour Guide

You have to love travelling. It is one of the greatest things I have ever done and after 18 years of it I am still enjoying it as much as setting off that first day...

However there is certainly an ART to travelling. Time is both your friend and your enemy. Far too many groups or tourists rush through and past places if they only knew exsited, they would stop and stay in for days, weeks.

Although I lead big tour groups for my other job, small group travel is simply the best way. As a private guide I insist on small groups. This allows us to get to know each other and the people we meet along the way. It allows us to stay for that extra limoncello offered at the end of dinner, to take the later row boat to the Blue Grotto, to fit into the Hotel Danieli bar for Bellini's, to eat Steak Hache in the finest such restaurant in Le Marais. The list is endless.

When you travel with me, my aim is to strive to emulate Guillaumet in the famous book Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery;

"But what a strange lesson in geography I was given! Guillaumet, did not teach Spain to me, he made the country my friend. He did not talk about provinces, or peoples, or livestock. Instead of telling me about Guadix, he spoke of three orange-trees on the edge of the town: "Beware of those trees. Better mark them on the map." And those three orange-trees seemed to me thenceforth higher than the Sierra Nevada.

He did not talk about Lorca, but about a humble farm near Lorca, a living farm with its farmer and the farmer's wife. And this tiny, this remote couple, living a thousand miles from where we sat, took on a universal importance. Settled on the slope of a mountain, they watched like lighthouse-keepers beneath the stars, ever on the lookout to succor men.

The details that we drew up from oblivion, from their inconceivable remoteness, no geographer had been concerned to explore. Because it washed the banks of great cities, the Ebro River was of interest to mapmakers. But what had they to do with that brook running secretly through the water-weeds to the west of Motril, that brook nourishing a mere score or two of flowers?"

Hope to travel together soon...