Curated Trips

This is how I travel. I choose a theme (a writer, a painter, a stretch of history) and let it decide where to go and what to see. A theme gives a trip its spine. It doesn’t have to run the whole show.

Place shapes everything. The BrontΓ«s wrote the way they did because the Yorkshire moors are an insistent character. Van Gogh’s palette changed in Provence because the light there is different. Geography isn’t backdrop; it’s cause. I’m a scholar more than an artist, and this is how I apply scholarship to travel.

Think of the trips below as a tasting menu. If you like the way I think, I’ll turn one of them into your trip and hand it to you on a silver platter, or a gold or bronze one, depending on the level of hotels you choose. If you have a theme of your own, these are my proof that I can build that one too. Solo, as a couple, or with ten friends, the trip is shaped around you.

Every Nerds Original is fully customizable. Nothing is required: change anything, and pay only for what you keep. Each one leaves plenty of free time, and the travel documents I send before you leave include my suggestions for filling it. The trips marked Joan’s Pick are escorted departures I’ve vetted; their itineraries are set by the partner who runs them.

Curated Trips Grid β€” Nerds Tour Preview
History Architecture
The Last Stand: Seven Centuries of Al‑Andalus
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
Best in spring and autumn.
In the 960s, a German nun called CΓ³rdoba "the ornament of the world." This nine-day journey follows al-Andalus in the order its history unfolded, from Toledo through CΓ³rdoba and Seville to the Alhambra, the last stand in 1492. The libraries were burned. The buildings are still standing.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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Art History
Light, Speed, and the Open Road
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
Giverny is open April 1 to November 1.
He talked the stationmaster into holding the trains so he could paint the smoke. This eight-day journey follows Impressionism through the inventions that made it possible (the paint tube, the flat brush, the train) from Paris to Monet's garden at Giverny to the fog on the Thames.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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Art History
Colors of Provence
Joan's Pick Β· Escorted
Van Gogh moved to Arles in 1888 for the light, and it changed his palette. This seven-night RhΓ΄ne river cruise from Lyon to Arles follows that light past Roman Vienne and the Papal Palace at Avignon, with Smithsonian Journeys guides explaining why it looks the way it does.
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Literary History BBC
Scotland: An Outlander Journey
Joan's Pick Β· Escorted
Diana Gabaldon's Scotland is still there, and the history behind it is as compelling as the story. This seven-day journey runs from Edinburgh through the Highlands to Inverness, to the castles, battlefields, and standing stones the cameras returned to again and again. Culloden is real. So is Clava Cairns.
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History Architecture
Paris, Loire Castles & Normandy
Joan's Pick Β· Group
Some places you read about for years before you see them. This nine-day journey covers the ones that did that for me: the Loire chΓ’teaux, where the French Renaissance still stands; the Normandy beaches of June 1944; and Mont-Saint-Michel, rising slowly as you cross the causeway.
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Literary History
All the Light: A Saint-Malo Journey
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
Anthony Doerr mapped his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel onto the real streets of Saint-Malo, and the walled city still looks almost as it did in August 1944. This ten-day journey follows Marie-Laure from her father's museum in Paris to the Breton coast. These fictional characters walked real streets.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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Theatre History Literary
A Shakespeare Adventure
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
He was born in a half-timbered house on Henley Street and buried fifty-two years later in the church by the river. In between, he changed theatre forever. This seven-day journey follows his life through Stratford, Oxford, and London's Bankside, where the plays were staged. You will stand where he stood.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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Literary History BBC
An Austen Adventure
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
A car is required for Days 4–6. Nerds Tour arranges everything.
Jane Austen lived in Bath, wrote in a Hampshire cottage, and died in Winchester, and her England is still almost entirely intact. This eight-day journey runs from Bath's Georgian terraces to Chawton, where all six novels were written or revised, to her grave in Winchester Cathedral, with a day at Lyme Regis or the great houses of the films.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director β€” and the car gives way to fully arranged group transportation.
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Literary History
A BrontΓ« Adventure
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
Best in August, when the heather blooms.
Haworth is two worlds separated by a hill: the parsonage and cobbled street of Jane Eyre at the top, the moors of Wuthering Heights out the back gate. This seven-day journey spends five nights where three sisters wrote at one table, and ends in York. The place explains the books.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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Literary History
A Dickens Adventure
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
One man saw Victorian England so clearly that "Dickensian" now describes an entire world. This seven-day journey follows Dickens through the two places that made him: the Kent of his childhood fears and greatest novels, and the London he walked at all hours. His world is still visible. So is the man.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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Literary History BBC
Murders Most Scenic
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
Best April through September β€” see itinerary for planning details.
Agatha Christie lived in Wallingford for over forty years, and the Thames Valley villages around her home became the filming locations of Midsomer Murders. This five-night itinerary follows both: a day touring the Midsomer villages from Oxford, then Wallingford, her walks along the Thames, and a steam railway to her grave.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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Literary History BBC
Murders Most Oxford
Nerds Original Β· Self-Guided
Colin Dexter set thirteen Inspector Morse novels in Oxford, and the city has barely changed since. This six-night itinerary follows the whole Morse universe (Endeavour's 1960s, Morse's 1980s, Lewis's today) through the same colleges and pubs. One day is yours for Tolkien, Lewis, or Wilde, because Oxford never runs out of writers, or bodies.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
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How pricing works

There’s no price on these pages because there’s no fixed trip. Your price depends on your choices: your dates, how far ahead you book, your hotel level (gold, silver, or bronze), how many of you are traveling, and what you add or take away. Choose your dates and reach out, and I’ll price the trip you actually want. Nothing is booked until you say so.

Don’t see your nerd here? Tell me what moves you, and we’ll build it.

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