Where to Go? Try Our Favorite Travel Destinations

Q: With your extensive travel experiences, do you have advice for where my wife and I might travel when the opportunity for travel arises?A: My answer would be that where to go and what to do. It depends on your interests, plus other factors. If you are traveling from the East Coast, it would make international trips to the East less harassing for you. Maybe that's why we find trips across the Pacific more acceptable from the West Coast, though we really enjoy Europe.

From a personal perspective, I’ve found the following really worth doing:

A Land Tour of Greece. My wife Nancy and I did it 20 years ago with Maupintour, but we find that company isn't as good as it used to be. Today I'd go with a tour operator like Insight Vacations. I wrote this about them four months ago at TravelingBoy.com:

“Insight Vacations is another upscale tour operator. It thinks of itself as "the Business Class of escorted tours." The tour groups are smaller so there's more room in the coaches and they've been retrofitted with that in mind. The parent company president is more than 6 feet tall and says one of Insight's best features is the legroom on the coaches. Insight also has a program called Select Choices, which is a hybrid between an Escorted and an individual tour. The traveler has the advantage of being taken from city to city, but once there is left on his or her own to explore. The Select Choices guide acts as a concierge offering suggestions for restaurants and sightseeing, but the traveler gets to do it on his own.”

A Cruise. That's a huge subject in itself. There's such variety. The newcomer is Azamara Club Cruises and boy is it pushing the envelope with huge consumer satisfaction. Starting in April 2011, its two small ships will stay for two or three nights at selected destinations, giving passengers more time to savor a place. On special occasions, it will travel to places such as Monaco for the Grand Prix, or Rio for Carnival.

Our favorite cruise line is Uniworld. We've taken four cruises with them and its Eastern European river cruise down the Danube from Vienna to Bucharest is fascinating. Here are more tips for choosng the right cruise.

Searching for Your Roots. You could travel to the place of your ancestors, or depending on your specialty, you might hunt down historical places of note for your medical specialty. (For example, a cardiac surgeon might visit places full of cardiac surgical history, such as South Africa, Houston, or even, for any surgeon, John Hunter's London.)

Canada. The Great North is always a successful visit. Far away enough to be foreign but safe and easy to get to.

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The Andersons, who live in San Diego, are the resident travel & cruise columnists for Physician's Money Digest. Nancy is a former nursing educator, Eric a retired MD. The one-time president of the New Hampshire Academy of Family Practice, Eric is the only physician in the American Society of Travel Writers. He has also written five books, the last called The Man Who Cried Orange: Stories from a Doctor's Life.