Professor leads two week
tour through Europe
By Morgan Conklin
Summer
Reporter
Students, area residents and anyone else interested
in going abroad are taking "The Grand Tour" around Europe
for the next two weeks.
Students can take this as an independent study
course, but most of the people going on the trip tend to go for the
experience.
Randy Roberts, a professor of history who has
been leading this tour for the past four years, said he tries to give
a realistic sense of European culture. "Europe is a beautiful,
wonderful, spectacular place, but it also needs to be looked at in
its entirety to gain a sense of history," he said.
The tour will travel through Germany, Italy and
France.
The tourists will be led through Munich and Heidelberg
while they are in Germany. They will tour castles, villages and Olympic
games sites.
After Germany, the tour will travel to Italy
where the days will be spent riding boats through canals and walking
through the streets.
France is the last area that the tour will cover.
Areas from the Alsace/Lorraine region, where the focus will be on
wine tasting, to Paris will be included in the trip.
These places are not the same ones that the tour
covered in previous trips.
Roberts chooses not to go to the same places
every year and tries to visit some areas that people have and have
not heard of. He said it keeps it exciting for both him and the tourists.
The other chaperone of this tour, Chris Elsey,
who is a graduate student at Purdue, said he hopes the group learns
that there are other ways of doing things in Europe. "Seeing
new things is important to the human experiences," he said. "Sometimes
people become so used to their regular routine that it makes their
eyes sparkle when they have new experiences."
The trip costs around $3,000, which includes
meals, transportation and hotel accommodations. Callouts are held
during the school year, and the trip is open to anyone interested.
