Concept
Imagine you are planning a vacation to Germany, and a friend of yours tells you that he or she has a friend in Heidelberg you should most definitely meet. If your friend happens to be one of the many hundred guests I have toured with over the years, I would like to think that this could happen.
I’m not a typical tour and driver guide. Yes, I drive people where they want to go, but I strive to be more of a friend than a tour guide. Sometimes we explore some of my favorite places, such as Heidelberg Castle and Old Town, the Neckar Valley, Schwetzingen’s Palace Gardens, the city of Speyer, the Palatinate wine region, the Black Forest, the city of Baden-Baden, the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, or the medieval town Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
But other times, my guests and I have discovered new places together, such as the open-air museum “Vogtsbauernhof” in the southern Black Forest where we viewed traditional homes from hundreds of years ago, or Burg Hornberg, where former guests and I learned about medieval weapons from a weapons collector and expert.
Yet at other times, I have explored places where the ancestors of my guests once lived — or places where my guests formerly lived while they or their parents were stationed in Germany. I have taken guests to see the hospitals where they were born, the churches where their ancestors were married, the restaurants where their parents celebrated their marriages, and restaurants owned by current relatives of my guests. I have even taken guests inside a castle that bore their family name!
My services go beyond those of an ordinary guide. For example, I love to help my guests in planning their trips, and a certain amount of planning is included in the price of a tour. If my guests desire to invest more in planning, I am willing to provide a greater level of service for an additional fee.
I love meeting people from around the globe and learning something new every time I host a new guest. For me, it is like traveling without having to leave home. I love to show people Germany from the perspective of a local, who has not only lived in Heidelberg, but who also has lived in other parts of Germany and in the United States.
Some of my guests are single people traveling alone, who enjoy spending a couple of hours or a few days with someone who treats them like a lifelong friend. Other guests are couples, groups of friends, or entire families, who are traveling independently. Yet others travel on Rhine River cruise ships and want to break away from the standard tours and see something a little different, or something special to their own interests.
Some of my clients arrive by air and are picked up at the airport. Some arrive by train. Others arrive on river ships, and I pick them up in the morning at the dock where the ship arrives and drop them in the evening at the dock from which the ship departs.