Curated Tours

I built Nerds Tour for people who travel the way they read: slowly, on purpose, with the whole story in mind. Not the greatest hits. Not eight cities in ten days. One writer, one painter, one film, one television series, followed all the way through the places that made it.

Place shapes everything. The Brontës 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 genuinely different. Agatha Christie stayed in Wallingford for forty years because that particular bend of the Thames suited her. Geography isn’t backdrop; it’s cause. Standing in the right place changes how you understand the work. I have experienced this. It’s why I do this.

The trips here are built around literature, art, and history, and around the films and series that brought those subjects to life for so many people, however they first encountered them. Some I designed myself. Others I found and vetted because they do the job better than anything I could have built. All of them start from the same question: why does this work feel the way it does, and what happens when you go to “the room where it happened?”

These trips work for a solo traveler who answers to no one, a couple negotiating the pace between themselves, or a group of ten (or more) arriving at the same moment of recognition simultaneously. Sometimes nerds like to travel in packs, especially when everyone is in on the nerd. For groups of ten or more, I will arrange everything and may even be available to be your tour director. The intellectual framework is the same whatever the size of the group.

Browse the trips below. I already can’t wait to talk about whichever one calls to you.

Curated Trips Grid — Nerds Tour Preview
Theatre History Literary
A Shakespeare Adventure
Nerds Original · Self-Guided
He was born in a half-timbered house on Henley Street, educated in a schoolroom that still stands, and buried fifty-two years later fifty yards away — and in between, he changed theatre forever. This seven-day journey follows the arc of Shakespeare's actual life across three cities: Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was born, courted, and buried; Oxford, where he slept on every journey between home and ambition; and London's Bankside, where he wrote and staged the plays that made him immortal. You will stand in the places 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
Murders Most Oxford
Nerds Original · Self-Guided
Colin Dexter wrote thirteen Inspector Morse novels set in Oxford before the television series made these streets famous to millions — and the city has barely changed since. This six-night itinerary follows the complete Morse universe across three eras: Endeavour's 1960s Oxford, Morse's 1980s Oxford, and Lewis's contemporary Oxford. The same colleges, the same pubs, the same golden stone under changing skies. One day is yours to spend with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, or Oscar 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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Art History
Colors of Provence
Joan's Pick · Escorted
Van Gogh moved to Arles in 1888 because of the light — the particular quality of the Provençal sun that he believed would transform his palette, and did. This seven-night Rhône river cruise from Lyon to Arles follows that same light through the landscapes that produced some of the most recognizable paintings in the world: the Roman ruins at Vienne, the Papal Palace at Avignon, the olive groves and lavender fields of the countryside, and finally Arles itself, where Van Gogh painted furiously and the color is exactly as he saw it. Smithsonian Journeys guides explain what you are seeing and why it looks the way it does. That is, after all, the whole question.
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Literary History
All the Light: A Saint-Malo Journey
Nerds Original · Self-Guided
Anthony Doerr mapped his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel onto the real streets of Saint-Malo with such precision that you can follow Marie-Laure's routes through the walled city almost step for step — because the city looks now almost exactly as it did in August 1944. This ten-day journey begins in Paris, where her father tended the locks of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, then follows their wartime exodus west to the Breton coast, where the novel's most devastating chapters unfold inside the ancient walls of Intra Muros. These fictional characters walked real streets.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
Learn more & get started
Literary History BBC
An Austen Adventure
Nerds Original · Self-Guided
A car is required for Days 4–6. Nerds Tour arranges everything.
Jane Austen lived in Bath, wrote her greatest novels in a Hampshire cottage, and died in Winchester — and the England she inhabited is still almost entirely intact. This eight-day self-guided journey follows her life from Bath's Georgian terraces to the village of Chawton where all six novels were written or revised, ending at her grave in Winchester Cathedral. Along the way, choose your own adventure: a day at the Cobb in Lyme Regis where Persuasion's most pivotal scene unfolds, or a day at the great houses that the BBC and film adaptations made famous. The novels and the landscapes that made them are inseparable. This trip proves it.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director — and the car gives way to fully arranged group transportation.
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Literary History BBC
Scotland: An Outlander Journey
Joan's Pick · Escorted
Diana Gabaldon wrote eight novels set in the Scottish Highlands before the television series brought Jamie and Claire's world to millions — and the Scotland both found is still very much there. This seven-day journey moves from Edinburgh through the Highlands to Inverness, covering the real castles, battlefields, and standing stones that shaped Gabaldon's fiction and that the cameras returned to again and again. Culloden is real. Clava Cairns is real. Glencoe is real. The history behind the story is as compelling as the story itself.
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Literary History
A Dickens Adventure
Nerds Original · Self-Guided
We use the word "Dickensian" to describe an entire world — the fog, the poverty, the moral outrage, the unforgettable characters — because one man looked at Victorian England so clearly, and wrote about it so ferociously, that he permanently shaped how we understand that age. 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 obsessively at all hours, turning everything he saw into fiction. The Victorian world he described is still visible in both. So is the man.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
Learn more & get started
History Architecture
Paris, Loire Castles & Normandy
Joan's Pick · Group
There are places you read about for years before you see them — and then you see them, and everything you learned becomes real at once. This nine-day journey through France covers the places that did that for me: the Loire châteaux, where the French Renaissance is still standing in stone; the Normandy coast, where the weight of June 1944 is impossible to put into words until you are standing on the beach; and Mont-Saint-Michel, which comes into focus slowly as you walk toward it across the causeway, and is every bit as extraordinary as you always believed it would be. Paris holds the beginning and the end. France holds the rest.
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Literary History BBC
Murders Most Scenic
Nerds Original · Self-Guided
Best April through September — see itinerary for planning details.
Agatha Christie lived in Wallingford for over forty years and is buried three miles away in the village of Cholsey — and the Thames Valley villages around her home became the real filming locations of Midsomer Murders. This five-night itinerary follows both worlds: a full day tour through the Midsomer villages departing from Oxford, then three days in Wallingford tracing Christie's life, her walks along the Thames, and a journey to her grave on a heritage steam railway that runs the same route she used herself.
Travelling with a group of 10 or more? Joan may even be available to be your tour director.
Learn more & get started

What now?

When you find a trip that speaks to you, the next step is simple: choose your dates, then reach out. Travel prices shift constantly depending on the time of year, how far out you book, and the accommodation level you choose, so the sooner you have dates in mind, the more accurately we can price it for you. Nothing is booked until you say so. New trips are added regularly, so if you don't see your nerd here yet, check back, or better yet, tell me what moves you and we will build it. That is exactly what we do. Click "learn more and get started" on any card, or use the button below to schedule a conversation. Either way, we’ll take it from there

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