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Pace 2? Experiences of a lifetime When you travel to Israel and Jordan with Tauck you explore all the threads — civilizations, cultures, history, traditions, religions and the arts — that are so intricately woven together throughout this compelling area of the world. Gain special insights into its diversity from knowledgeable local guides and experts in their fields as our multidimensional Jordan and Israel tours take you from bustling modern-day Tel Aviv to ancient sites such as 4,year-old Jaffa, King Herod's port city of Caesarea, mountaintop Masada and Jerusalem's Old City.

Expand your understanding of the religions that have so much to do with Israel and Jordan, past and present, during a Tauck Exclusive private panel discussion. Sail on the Sea of Galilee, relax at a resort along the Dead Sea, travel on Jordan's King's Highway to the fabled pink city of Petra, and dine Bedouin-style at a traditional feast.

Privately guided tours and special cultural experiences for Tauck guests only bring it all to life, and superb hotels put you in the best locations throughout this extraordinary trip. Read Less. Dine at The Eucalyptus Day 7. The Eucalyptus offers a modern interpretation to the dishes of biblical passages Tonight, you'll have an opportunity to taste the flavors of the ancient world forgotten for centuries as chef and owner, Moshe Basson, serves you a tasting menu inspired by biblical passages and his modern interpretations of them.

Kudos to the creators of this tour — they provided the very best hotels, activities and local guides. Gerald Huchital Tauck Traveler Review. Overnight Accommodations. Extend your stay Arrive Early. Extend your stay Stay Later. Download Overnight Details.

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Reviews and Forums. View Tauck's Community Message Board. Reviews Alan B. This is particularly so in an age of instantaneous communication and revolutionary political flux. Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just—not only by leaders, but also by citizens.

It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.

World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world. Regional orders involve the same principles applied to a defined geographic area. Any one of these systems of order bases itself on two components: a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political unit from subjugating all others.

A consensus on the legitimacy of existing arrangements does not—now or in the past—foreclose competitions or confrontations, but it helps ensure that they will occur as adjustments within the existing order rather than as fundamental challenges to it.

A balance of forces does not in itself secure peace, but if thoughtfully assembled and invoked, it can limit the scope and frequency of fundamental challenges and curtail their chance of succeeding when they do occur.

No book can hope to address every historic approach to international order or every country now active in shaping world affairs. This volume attempts to deal with the regions whose concepts of order have most shaped the evolution of the modern era.

The balance between legitimacy and power is extremely complex; the smaller the geographic area to which it applies and the more coherent the cultural convictions within it, the easier it is to distill a workable consensus.

But in the modern world the need is for a global world order. When you have become familiar with it, it will not seem so mysterious as before. In our time, the quest for world order will require relating the perceptions of societies whose realities have largely been self-contained. The mystery to be overcome is one all peoples share—how divergent historic experiences and values can be shaped into a common order. Order was established by their internal governance, not through an equilibrium among states: strong when the central authority was cohesive, more haphazard under weaker rulers.

In imperial systems, wars generally took place at the frontiers of the empire or as civil wars. Peace was identified with the reach of imperial power. In China and Islam, political contests were fought for control of an established framework of order. Dynasties changed, but each new ruling group portrayed itself as restoring a legitimate system that had fallen into disrepair. In Europe, no such evolution took hold. With the end of Roman rule, pluralism became the defining characteristic of the European order.

The idea of Europe loomed as a geographic designation, as an expression of Christianity or of court society, or as the center of enlightenment of a community of the educated and of modernity. Yet although it was comprehensible as a single civilization, Europe never had a single governance, or a united, fixed identity. It changed the principles in the name of which its various units governed themselves at frequent intervals, experimenting with a new concept of political legitimacy or international order.

Europe thrived on fragmentation and embraced its own divisions. For more than a thousand years, in the mainstream of modern European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and identity from resistance to universal rule. Rather, they lacked the strength to impose their will on each other decisively.

In time, pluralism took on the characteristics of a model of world order. Has Europe in our time transcended this pluralistic tendency—or do the internal struggles of the European Union affirm it? With the fall of Rome, conventionally dated in , the empire disintegrated. In what historians have called the Dark Ages, nostalgia for the lost universality flourished.

The vision of harmony and unity focused increasingly on the Church. Of these, the greater weight is with the priests in so far as they will answer to the Lord, even for kings, in the Last Judgment. This all-encompassing concept of world order had to contend with an anomaly from the start: in the post—Roman Europe, dozens of political rulers exercised sovereignty with no clear hierarchy among them; all invoked fealty to Christ, but their link to the Church and its authority was ambiguous.

Aspirations to unity were briefly realized on Christmas Day , when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, the Frankish King and conqueror of much of present-day France and Germany, as Imperator Romanorum Emperor of the Romans , and awarded him theoretical title to the former eastern half of the erstwhile Roman Empire, at that point the lands of Byzantium. Charlemagne, beset by tasks closer to home, never attempted to rule the lands of the erstwhile Eastern Roman Empire the Pope had allotted him.

In the west, he made little progress in recapturing Spain from its Moorish conquerors. China had its Emperor; Islam had its Caliph—the recognized leader of the lands of Islam. Europe had the Holy Roman Emperor. But the Holy Roman Emperor operated from a much weaker base than his confreres in other civilizations.

He had no imperial bureaucracy at his disposal. His authority depended on his strength in the regions he governed in his dynastic capacity, essentially his family holdings. His position was not formally hereditary and depended on election by a franchise of seven, later nine, princes; these elections were generally decided by a mixture of political maneuvering, assessments of religious piety, and vast financial payoffs.

A universal order based on the possibility of a single reign and a single set of legitimating principles was increasingly drained of any practicality. A full flowering of the medieval concept of world order was envisioned only briefly with the rise of the sixteenth-century Habsburg prince Charles — ; his rule also ushered in its irrevocable decay.

The stern and pious Flemish-born prince was born to rule; except for a widely noted taste for spiced food, he was generally perceived to be without vices and immune to distraction.

He inherited the crown of the Netherlands as a child and that of Spain—with its vast and expanding array of colonies in Asia and the Americas—at sixteen. The coincidence of these titles meant that the medieval vision seemed poised to be fulfilled. Charles personally led a counterattack in Tunisia, with a fleet funded by gold from the New World.

A Chinese or Turkish visitor to Europe at that time might well have perceived a seemingly familiar political system: a continent presided over by a single dynasty imbued with a sense of divine mandate. If Charles had been able to consolidate his authority and manage an orderly succession in the vast Habsburg territorial conglomerate, Europe would have been shaped by a dominant central authority like the Chinese Empire or the Islamic caliphate.

It did not happen; nor did Charles try. In the end, he was satisfied to base order on equilibrium. Hegemony might be his inheritance but not his objective, as he proved when, after capturing his temporal political rival the French King Francis I in the Battle of Pavia in , he released him—freeing France to resume a separate and adversarial foreign policy at the heart of Europe. The universality of the Church Charles sought to vindicate was not to be had.

He proved unable to prevent the new doctrine of Protestantism from spreading through the lands that were the principal base of his power. The effort to fulfill his aspirations inherent in his office was beyond the capabilities of a single individual.

Charles resolved to abdicate his dynastic titles and divide his vast empire, and did so in a manner reflecting the pluralism that had defeated his quest for unity. To his son Philip, he bequeathed the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, then the crown of Spain and its global empire. In an emotional ceremony in Brussels, he reviewed the record of his reign, attested to the diligence with which he had fulfilled his duties, and in the process handed the States-General of the Netherlands to Philip as well.

The same year, Charles concluded a landmark treaty, the Peace of Augsburg, which recognized Protestantism within the Holy Roman Empire. Abandoning the spiritual foundation of his empire, Charles afforded princes the right to choose the confessional orientation of their territory. Shortly afterward, he resigned his title as Holy Roman Emperor, passing responsibility for the empire, its upheavals, and its external challenges to his brother Ferdinand.

Charles retired to a monastery in a rural region of Spain, to a life of seclusion. He spent his last days in the company of his confessor and of an Italian clock maker, whose works lined the walls and whose trade Charles attempted to learn. When Charles died in , his will expressed regret for the fracturing of doctrine that had taken place during his reign and charged his son to redouble the Inquisition. Three events completed the disintegration of the old ideal of unity.

A map depicting the universe, as comprehended by educated Europeans in the medieval age, would have shown Northern and Southern Hemispheres stretching from India in the east to Iberia and the islands of Britain in the west, with Jerusalem in the center.

In the medieval perception, this was not a map for travelers but a stage divinely ordained for the drama of human redemption. The world, it was believed on biblical authority, was six-sevenths land and one-seventh water.

Because the principles of salvation were fixed and could be cultivated through efforts in the lands known to Christendom, there was no reward for venturing past the fringes of civilization. The modern era announced itself when enterprising societies sought glory and wealth by exploring the oceans and whatever lay beyond them.

In the fifteenth century, Europe and China ventured forth almost contemporaneously. China continued to insist on the universal relevance of its principles of world order, but it would henceforth cultivate them at home and with the peoples along its borders. It never again attempted a comparable naval effort—until perhaps our own time.

Sixty years later, the European powers sailed from a continent of competing sovereign authorities; each monarch sponsored naval exploration largely in the hope of achieving a commercial or strategic edge over his rivals. Both began to displace the existing trade monopolies and political structures. The age of three centuries of preponderant European influence in world affairs had been launched.

International relations, once a regional enterprise, would henceforth be geographically global, with the center of gravity in Europe, in which the concept of world order was defined and its implementation determined. A revolution of thinking about the nature of the political universe followed.

How was one to conceive of the inhabitants of regions no one had known existed? How did they fit into the medieval cosmology of empire and papacy? A council of theologians summoned by Charles V in —51 in the Spanish city of Valladolid had concluded that the people living in the Western Hemisphere were human beings with souls— hence eligible for salvation. This theological conclusion was, of course, also a maxim justifying conquest and conversion.

Europeans were enabled to increase their wealth and salve their consciences simultaneously. Their global competition for territorial control changed the nature of international order. The second seminal event was the invention of movable-type printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, which made it possible to share knowledge on a hitherto- unimaginable scale. Medieval society had stored knowledge by memorizing or laboriously hand-copying religious texts or by understanding history through epic poetry.

In the age of exploration, what was being discovered needed to be understood, and printing permitted accounts to be disseminated. The exploration of new worlds inspired as well a quest to rediscover the ancient world and its verities, with special emphasis on the centrality of the individual.

The growing embrace of reason as an objective force of illumination and explication began to shake existing institutions, including the hitherto-unassailable Catholic Church. A number of feudal rulers seized the opportunity to enhance their authority by embracing Protestantism, imposing it on their populations, and enriching themselves by seizing Church lands.

Each side regarded the other as heretical, and disagreements turned into life-or-death struggles as political and sectarian disputes commingled. Christianity was split and at war with itself. A century of intermittent wars attended the rise and spread of the Protestant critique of Church supremacy: the Habsburg Empire and the papacy both sought to stamp out the challenge to their authority, and Protestants resisted in defense of their new faith.

The Protestant princes were generally located in the north of Germany, including the then relatively insignificant Prussia; the Catholic heartland was the south of Germany and Austria. Yet faced with a choice between spiritual unity and strategic advantage, more than a few chose the latter.

Foremost among them was France. In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic authority is in a position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger international objectives. A cadre of sophisticated and ruthless French ministers saw their opportunity and moved decisively. The Kingdom of France began the process by giving itself a new governance.

A man of the cloth steeped in court intrigue, Richelieu was well adapted to a period of religious upheaval and crumbling established structures. Lore holds that Richelieu completed his religious studies so swiftly that he was below the normal minimum age for a clerical appointment; he resolved this obstacle by traveling to Rome and personally lying to the Pope about his age.

It is not known whether Richelieu was familiar with these texts on the politics of power. He surely practiced their essential principles.

Richelieu developed a radical approach to international order. He invented the idea that the state was an abstract and permanent entity existing in its own right. Hence it should be the basic unit of international relations.

Richelieu commandeered the incipient state as an instrument of high policy. Royal power would continue to be exercised by the King as the symbol of the sovereign state and an expression of the national interest. Richelieu saw the turmoil in Central Europe not as a call to arms to defend the Church but as a means to check imperial Habsburg preeminence. To outraged complaints that, as a cardinal, he owed a duty to the universal and eternal Catholic Church—which would imply an alignment against the rebellious Protestant princes of Northern and Central Europe—Richelieu cited his duties as a minister to a temporal, yet vulnerable, political entity.

Salvation might be his personal objective, but as a statesman he was responsible for a political entity that did not have an eternal soul to be redeemed. The basic threat to France was strategic, not metaphysical or religious: a united Central Europe would be in a position to dominate the rest of the Continent.

For as long as this concept served as the essence of the European order, France was preeminent on the Continent. First, the indispensable element of a successful foreign policy is a long-term strategic concept based on a careful analysis of all relevant factors. Second, the statesman must distill that vision by analyzing and shaping an array of ambiguous, often conflicting pressures into a coherent and purposeful direction.

He or she must know where this strategy is leading and why. Because repetition of the familiar leads to stagnation, no little daring is required. The representatives meeting to negotiate it were more focused at the time on considerations of protocol and status.

By the time representatives of the Holy Roman Empire and its two main adversaries, France and Sweden, agreed in principle to convene a peace conference, the conflict had ground on for twenty-three years. Another two years of battle transpired before the delegations actually met; in the meantime, each side maneuvered to strengthen its allies and internal constituencies.

Unlike other landmark agreements such as the Congress of Vienna in —15 or the Treaty of Versailles in , the Peace of Westphalia did not emerge from a single conference, and the setting was not one generally associated with a gathering of statesmen pondering transcendent questions of world order. Mirroring the variety of contenders in a war that had ranged from Spain to Sweden, the peace emerged from a series of separate arrangements made in two different Westphalian towns.

With no official conference head or mediator and no plenary sessions, representatives met on an ad hoc basis and traveled in a neutral zone between the two cities to coordinate positions, sometimes meeting informally in towns in the middle.

Some of the major powers stationed representatives in both cities. Combat continued in various parts of Europe throughout the talks, with shifting military dynamics affecting the course of the negotiations. Most representatives had come with eminently practical instructions based on strategic interests. It was now taken for granted that peace would be built, if at all, through balancing rivalries. The Peace of Westphalia that emerged from these convoluted discussions is probably the most frequently cited diplomatic document in European history, though in fact no single treaty exists to embody its terms.

Nor did the delegates ever meet in a single plenary session to adopt it. The peace is in reality the sum of three separate complementary agreements signed at different times in different cities.

Yet the mechanisms through which they were to be reached were unprecedented. The war had shattered pretensions to universality or confessional solidarity. Much like the Middle Eastern conflagrations of our own period, sectarian alignments were invoked for solidarity and motivation in battle but were just as often discarded, trumped by clashes of geopolitical interests or simply the ambitions of outsized personalities.

Paradoxically, this general exhaustion and cynicism allowed the participants to transform the practical means of ending a particular war into general concepts of world order. With dozens of battle-hardened parties meeting to secure hard-won gains, old forms of hierarchical deference were quietly discarded.

The inherent equality of sovereign states, regardless of their power or domestic system, was instituted. Newly arrived powers, such as Sweden and the Dutch Republic, were granted protocol treatment equal to that of established great powers like France and Austria. The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping.

The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established. The right of each signatory to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could practice their faith in peace and be free from the prospect of forced conversion.

Diplomatic exchanges, including the stationing of resident representatives in the capitals of fellow states a practice followed before then generally only by Venetians , were designed to regulate relations and promote the arts of peace. The parties envisioned future conferences and consultations on the Westphalian model as forums for settling disputes before they led to conflict.

International law, developed by traveling scholar-advisors such as Hugo de Groot Grotius during the war, was treated as an expandable body of agreed doctrine aimed at the cultivation of harmony, with the Westphalian treaties themselves at its heart.

The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive. The Westphalian concept took multiplicity as its starting point and drew a variety of multiple societies, each accepted as a reality, into a common search for order. By the mid-twentieth century, this international system was in place on every continent; it remains the scaffolding of international order such as it now exists.

The Peace of Westphalia did not mandate a specific arrangement of alliances or a permanent European political structure. With the end of the universal Church as the ultimate source of legitimacy, and the weakening of the Holy Roman Emperor, the ordering concept for Europe became the balance of power—which, by definition, involves ideological neutrality and adjustment to evolving circumstances.

Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. Today these Westphalian concepts are often maligned as a system of cynical power manipulation, indifferent to moral claims. Yet the structure established in the Peace of Westphalia represented the first attempt to institutionalize an international order on the basis of agreed rules and limits and to base it on a multiplicity of powers rather than the dominance of a single country.

Armies had marched across Europe for generations under the banner of universal and contradictory moral claims; prophets and conquerors had unleashed total war in pursuit of a mixture of personal, dynastic, imperial, and religious ambitions.

The theoretically logical and predictable intermeshing of state interests was intended to overcome the disorder unfolding in every corner of the Continent.

Limited wars over calculable issues would replace the era of contending universalisms, with its forced expulsions and conversions and general war consuming civilian populations. With all its ambiguities, the balancing of power was thought an improvement over the exactions of religious wars. But how was the balance of power to be established?

In theory, it was based on realities; hence every participant in it should see it alike. Hence the balance of power needs to be recalibrated from time to time. It produces the wars whose extent it also limits. What political theory could then explain the origin and justify the functions of secular political order?

In his Leviathan, published in , three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes provided such a theory. Therefore: Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another, which are comprehended in that law which is commonly called the law of nations, I need not say anything in this place, because the law of nations and the law of nature is the same thing.

And every sovereign hath the same right, in procuring the safety of his people, that any particular man can have, in procuring the safety of his own body. The international arena remained in the state of nature and was anarchical because there was no world sovereign available to make it secure and none could be practically constituted.

Thus each state would have to place its own national interest above all in a world where power was the paramount factor. Cardinal Richelieu would have emphatically agreed. The Peace of Westphalia in its early practice implemented a Hobbesian world. How was this new balance of power to be calibrated? A distinction must be made between the balance of power as a fact and the balance of power as a system.

Any international order—to be worthy of that name—must sooner or later reach an equilibrium, or else it will be in a constant state of warfare. Because the medieval world contained dozens of principalities, a practical balance of power frequently existed in fact. After the Peace of Westphalia, the balance of power made its appearance as a system; that is to say, bringing it about was accepted as one of the key purposes of foreign policy; disturbing it would evoke a coalition on behalf of equilibrium.

The rise of Britain as a major naval power by early in the eighteenth century made it possible to turn the facts of the balance of power into a system. Until the outbreak of World War I, England acted as the balancer of the equilibrium. It fought in European wars but with shifting alliances—not in pursuit of specific, purely national goals, but by identifying the national interest with the preservation of the balance of power.

There were in fact two balances of power being conducted in Europe after the Westphalian settlement: The overall balance, of which England acted as a guardian, was the protector of general stability. A Central European balance essentially manipulated by France aimed to prevent the emergence of a unified Germany in a position to become the most powerful country on the Continent.

The balance of power can be challenged in at least two ways: The first is if a major country augments its strength to a point where it threatens to achieve hegemony. The second occurs when a heretofore-secondary state seeks to enter the ranks of the major powers and sets off a series of compensating adjustments by the other powers until a new equilibrium is established or a general conflagration takes place.

The French King had in the past ruled through feudal lords with their own autonomous claims to authority based on heredity. Louis governed through a royal bureaucracy dependent entirely on him. He downgraded courtiers of noble blood and ennobled bureaucrats. What counted was service to the King, not rank of birth. The brilliant Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, son of a provincial draper, was charged with unifying the tax administration and financing constant war. No amount of wealth or possessions would avail him then.

That was one reason why he liked to give his ministers authority over the highest in the Land, even over the Princes of the Blood. With a unified kingdom spared the ravages of internal war, possessing a skilled bureaucracy and a military surpassing that of any neighboring state, France was for a while in a position to seek dominance in Europe. In the end, as was the case with all later aspirants to European hegemony, each new conquest galvanized an opposing coalition of nations.

The opposition to Louis was not ideological or religious in nature: French remained the language of diplomacy and high culture through much of Europe, and the Catholic-Protestant divide ran through the allied camp. Rather, it was inherent in the Westphalian system and indispensable to preserve the pluralism of the European order.

Its character was defined in the name contemporary observers gave it: the Great Moderation. Louis sought what amounted to hegemony in the name of the glory of France. He was defeated by a Europe that sought its order in diversity. Situated on the harsh North German plain and extending from the Vistula across Germany, Prussia cultivated discipline and public service to substitute for the larger population and greater resources of better-endowed countries.

Split into two noncontiguous pieces, it jutted precariously into the Austrian, Swedish, Russian, and Polish spheres of influence. It was relatively sparsely populated; its strength was the discipline with which it marshaled its limited resources. Its greatest assets were civic- mindedness, an efficient bureaucracy, and a well-trained army.

When Frederick II ascended the throne in , he seemed an unlikely contender for the greatness history has vouchsafed him. Finding the dour discipline of the position of Crown Prince oppressive, he had attempted to flee to England accompanied by a friend, Hans Hermann von Katte. They were apprehended. The King ordered von Katte decapitated in front of Frederick, whom he submitted to a court-martial headed by himself. He cross-examined his son with questions, which Frederick answered so deftly that he was reinstated.

Frederick concluded that great-power status required territorial contiguity for Prussia, hence expansion. There was no need for any other political or moral justification. In the process, Frederick brought war back to the European system, which had been at peace since when the Treaty of Utrecht had put an end to the ambitions of Louis XIV. The price for being admitted as a new member to the European order turned out to be seven years of near-disastrous battle.

Russia, remote and mysterious, for the first time entered a contest over the European balance of power.

At the edge of defeat, with Russian armies at the gates of Berlin, Frederick was saved by the sudden death of Catherine the Great. The new Czar, a longtime admirer of Frederick, withdrew from the war. Hitler, besieged in encircled Berlin in April , waited for an event comparable to the so-called Miracle of the House of Brandenburg and was told by Joseph Goebbels that it had happened when President Franklin D.

Roosevelt died. The Holy Roman Empire had become a facade; no rival European claimant to universal authority had arisen. Almost all rulers asserted that they ruled by divine right—a claim not challenged by any major power—but they accepted that God had similarly endowed many other monarchs.

Wars were therefore fought for limited territorial objectives, not to overthrow existing governments and institutions, nor to impose a new system of relations between states. Tradition prevented rulers from conscripting their subjects and severely constrained their ability to raise taxes.

International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals. National interests of course varied, but in a world where a foreign minister could serve a monarch of another nationality every Russian foreign minister until was recruited abroad , or when a territory could change its national affiliation as the result of a marriage pact or a fortuitous inheritance, a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent.

Power calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct. This consensus was not only a matter of decorum; it reflected the moral convictions of a common European outlook. Europe was never more united or more spontaneous than during what came to be perceived as the age of enlightenment.

New triumphs in science and philosophy began to displace the fracturing European certainties of tradition and faith. Spreading through nature in all directions like a river which has burst its dams, this fermentation has swept with a sort of violence everything along with it which stood in its way.

The political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, applied the principles of the balance of power to domestic policy by describing a concept of checks and balances later institutionalized in the American Constitution.

He went on from there into a philosophy of history and of the mechanisms of societal change. Surveying the histories of various societies, Montesquieu concluded that events were never caused by accident. One hotel already mentioned and the breabfasts already mentioned. Collette Support. Great service and fabulous tour guide, Barbara! Her attention to detail was exceptional!! Not a fan of early mornings but she made them ok!! Great well planned trip.

Seeing the Tetons and wild animals was great! The tour was wonderful. I saw amazing landscape for the first time. Our guide Barbara was extremely good. Full of information about every place we visited.

Plenty of rest stops. Extremely well paced. Every thing we expected and more. Keith Reaves, Barbara and Don,, Thank you! The service was great, everything was taken care of. We had a great experience viewing the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone Nat'l park.

I was fascinated by the geological eruptions, mud pots, geysers, hot springs. From the moment I booked this tour, Collette answered any and all questions I had and made all other reservations before and after the tour. The tour was on the top of my bucket list and did not disappoint. My only disappointment was the construction at Mt. Rushmore, which I know will only make the attraction better. I think that the Badlands in South Dakota was a highlight.

Our tour manager, Ann, was very informative. Left the driving and organization to them. Yellowstone National Park. Loved it. Especially the Lower Falls. The tour manager did okay. Provided information about what we were going to see and making sure we knew the schedule as well as options of things to do at the various stops.

Our bus driver did an excellent job, even making sure the windows were cleaned each day. The Yellowstone guide provided us with a good tour and information about Yellowstone's geography. The Deadwood guide was excellent as well as hilarious, making the tour very enjoyable. The guide at the National Museum of Wildlife Art went on and on about numerous paintings that we finally broke away from her tour and went on our own for the few minutes we had left at the museum.

Never did see Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol art as advertised in the Collette brochure or have time to see much of the outdoor art sculptures. It was a good tour, not excellent. I was disappointed that the raft trip in Jackson Hole was no longer included in this tour. Instead, a visit to an art museum replaced it. That turned out to be mostly wasted time. Rafting seemed to be the thing to do at Jackson Hole in the summer months. That would have been an excellent western experience.

The best and most enjoyable "cowboy" thing on the trip was the chuck wagon dinner in Jackson Hole where you ride to the dinner in a covered wagon. There was too much time in Jackson to just walk around the town and shop.

We even arrived in Jackson by PM with nothing planned for that day except to walk around, eat lunch someplace and shop. One couple happened to find out there was a rodeo that evening. I would have been nice if our tour guide had told us about that. There should have been some optional activities to take in Jackson.. The Collette brochure for this trip should be revised to eliminate the iconic photo of the red barn in front of the Grand Tetons.

You will not see this location on this trip. That spot was apparently not far from where we were but the tour guide said it is not on our itinerary. Really enjoyed seeing Yellowstone. The scenery was beautiful, but animal sightings were disappointing unless you were on the "right" side of the bus. Our hotel in Yellowstone was just a short walk from Old Faithful allowing you to see it several times. However, the most photographed thermal feature, the Grand Prismatic Spring, was a short drive away, but our tour guide told us that was not on the agenda and that there was not room there for a bus to park.

A satellite view of that feature shews at least 15 bus parking spaces. Deadwood, SD was a neat town with an excellent local guide. Not enough time there, especially when that is also your lunch stop. That happened at the Cody Museum and Crazy House site as well. I have used Collette tours for 4 tours and everyone of them were magnificent. This American Cowboy tour only lacked one important event-- the Welcome Dinner on the first night.

It would have helped for the single travelers to start bonding with the group. Best part of this trip is Yellowstone National Park. Well everything! Trip was awesome, but with the cost it should have included all the tips. There was too much free time. We arrived at noon and once we walked around, that was it. It would have been nice to have an opportunity to have had an excursion.

Dinner was on our own and we understand from another guest there was a rodeo in town that night. No one told us. The Docent, Ms. Fleishman, at the National Musem of Wildlife Art was terrible.

We only saw the lobby and two rooms. Absolutely the very best Chuck Wagon Dinner!! Loved Yellowstone, however the guide didn't know the population of Wyoming. Wht else did he tell us that wasn't true?

We did not get to see the huge blue lake at Yellowstone. Unfortunately Mr. Rushmore was being worked on so we weren't able to see it lit at night. We were in Deadwood on a Sunday and loved the tour. However there weren't any re-enactors which Deadwood is known for. It was a long holiday weekend and there wasn't anyway to get a "quick" lunch or dinner anywhere.

We feel we missed quite a bit of the trip having lunch. One of our group decided to get ice cream so they wouldn't miss anything. Wish we would have thought of that. Liked the badlands and Wall Drug--again a long lunch. We would have liked our tour guide to have given us more information as we drove along. Our tour guide in the UK was fabulous. She never stopped giving us information about the area, people, culture, wildlife, plants etc.

Unfortunately my husband became ill in Rapid City. There were no drug stores nearby and fortuantely a guest had an OTC which was really helpful. Our tour guide was not as helpful.

I took a tour from you to the UK and it was fabulous. Our tour guide was terrific, knowledgeable, and helpful. We had very little down time and she always told us where to get served quickly. I think going over a long holiday weekend wasn't the best. We waited in one restaurant for dinner for a half hour and then the seating wasn't very good.

I did have a good time. The driver was terrific and the scenery was fabulous. There were a few things I missed that I think could have been included. My favorite was the Chuck Wagon Dinner. It was the best!!

The family was so talented. Our trip went without a hitch. We saw bison, and Elk. Arrived with perfect timing for Old Faithful. Our tour manager and coach driver were great. I would certainly recommend this trip.

Loved all the visited sites. We enjoyed our tour to Cowboy Country. Our tour guide, Bryan, even made it better! Super star guide. Great itinerary. Great bus driver. On our Collette trip to Australia this January we will need to carry cash for tips for two people for 18 days.

Everything else was taken care of with charge card. I am not looking forward to having to carry such a large sum of cash over seas.

Extremely organized and very well chaperoned. All the luggage handling and schedules were on time. Everything we expected and more. The Tetons were displayed with clear blue skies.

Yellowstone was amazing. The museum in Cody, WY. Rapid City and Mt. Rushmore was a second visit for us. The Bison herd at Custer State Park was very large. This was my 2nd trip with Collette - both have been wonderful. The tour guides from Collette and the step on guides were very well informed with lots of information about each location we visited.

The hotels, meals and buses were wonderful. The driver very professional and helpful. I will continue to travel with Collette whenever I get the opportunity. All places on my bucket list. The tour guide was very knowledgeable, and friendly. We saw a lot of places. The tour was well organized. Excellent guide. Great accommodations.

It was an excellent trip. The only thing that I wish they would have done is offer more options for side trips for our free time for those who are not into shopping. When we asked our guide and the workers at the Jackson Hole hotel what there was to do they did not have any suggestions.

The free shuttles in Jackson Hole were nice but the bus drivers were very unfriendly. Really enjoyed staying at Rapid City. Materials especially booklet with suggestions would have been more helpful if sent earlier. Tote bags are worthless. We like the concept of changing seats each day. Guides and driver were all excellent. They were knowledgable and personable. They showed great care and soon realized pat needed some accommodations, even to having food served at Chuckwagon dinner so he did not have to handle a tray.

The museums were excellent.. Everytwas great. Great trip. Trip should have been a few days longer. Too much to see in a short period of time. Jammed packed with experiences! The trip was well planned and interesting, informative and entertaining. Much of our satisfaction was do to our excellent tour guide. All of the ratings and comments are for both me Mike and my wife Susan. I enjoyed the trip very much. It was unfortunate that we went in October. Many events were cancelled because places Closed at the end of September.

The river raft ride was changed due to low water and cold temperature. The temperature of the water was 40 and air temperature was 40 degrees. A few people 5 did the trip. I was disappointed that the Chuck wagon dinner was also cancelled. We did have a lovely dinner in Jackson Hole. We where supposed to stop at Keystone on Wednesday to have dinner but the town was closed. So we had a dinner out in Rapid City. The trip to Mount Rushmore was changed to a day time trip because the illumination of Mount Rushmore was cancelled, we had snow that day.

I was very happy to go on the Grand Teton tours which took on Sunday in place of the river raft ride. That trip was wonderful and should be added to the trip. I loved the Badlands tour and Wall Drug. The program with the Lakota Native American family was wonderful at the farewell dinner. I enjoyed learning more about the Native American culture. It is so different from New England the land and the trees I found it very interesting.

Thank you for all that Collette tours did to make this a special trip for me. Our tour guides Ann , Kimberly and bus driver Floyd where excellent. Thank You, It was a trip of a life time.

Dianne G Hawes. We had a terrific tour guide - we stopped at so many incredible places - a very good group of people - hotels were very good. The trip was well planned and done to perfection. Tour guide was awesome. Bus driver could not have been better. Every thing was spot one. All the rooms we stayed in were very comfortable. Our tour manager, Nicki Mullins, was very knowledgable and a really fun lady. We had a blast on a very comfortable bus and learned a lot.

Had a wonderful time!!! We were very busy every day on this trip so that we could see all the beautiful sites of that area. Highly recommend this trip! Our tour guide, Ann Boulais was Awesome!

She was knowledgeable and informative. She tried to make everyone feel "Special". I would highly recommend Collette to my friends and would not hesitate to book another tour with Collette. Tour was memorable and informational. The guide gave us lots of geological tidbits too. We just loved our Collette tour. I would recommend your business to others. Even when the weather impacted on the plans for the day, she came up with an alternative plan. All things considered, the trip was pretty good.