VaVenturers love to explore major sites, buildings, battle grounds and all places of interest. We don’t lose our sense of curiosity when we travel and part of the enjoyment is better understanding the history and forces that are the foundation of countries and peoples we visit.

On the other hand, it’s a vacation — the last thing we want is to trail around another overcrowded stone pile with a bus load of sweaty bored tourists listening to a lengthy disquisition on some obscure detail from early modern history.

Tour books are really good sources of information. They will give you dates of battles and when construction was started, heights and size of cathedrals and palaces and potted biographies of the notables who lived in them. They will also provide detail of the tapestries of this blue room or that green room in a specific castle. And, of course, smart and detailed analysis to pull it all together.

But actually using a tour book in real time? We all kinda try — but somehow that passage you were supposed to take on the left from the 3rd room after the bell tower - never seems to be where it’s supposed to be. Not to mention trying to read the background on the one painting you wanted to see that turns out to be on loan to a museum somewhere far from where you are.

And then there’s the reality that very few places actually tell the story. Wander the beaches of Normandy by yourself -for the most part they’re, well, beaches — and trying to figure out the story of D Day is actually really hard and frustrating.

VaVenturers know that one castle can be a lot like the next castle — for good reason since you’d expect smart medieval architects to build what they knew would work.

You want the place you are visiting to come alive. How did the people of Pompeii live, what did they eat, what was the daily routine of a wealthy lady or a house servant?

What was it like for a pilgrim to visit Chartres Cathedral and how did they “read” all the stained glass windows, how were they transformed by the message directed at them in the art?

How did the Americans manage to scale the cliffs of Normandy, how did the British create a port from scratch?

What did thousands of soldiers do between battles in WW1, what was in no man’s land, when one side won how much did they really win (Two city blocks worth of land)

The answer is to ditch the official tours and the bus companies — and recognize that self guiding may not be the answer — and spend a little more money on the burgeoning number of small, private tours. Somewhere between $80 — $150 a person for a full day. A guide who may live in the area, be an historian, archeologist or art curator and who loves the subject matter that elevates it from a rote script for the masses into an intimate, memorable experience on your schedule and pitched to your interests.

Our tour guide in the Somme told us about the “vender de fer”.,The “harvest of iron”. To this day every year as they ploughing the soil, farmers unearth tons of shrapnel, bits of the millions of shells lobbed across the front still buried in the fields along the First World War’s Western Front.

On that tour, we walked where trenches had been, around a mine crater that had been the largest explosion know to man at that time and that marked the beginning of the 1916 battle. Only with a military expert can you learn to look at the landscape as a soldier or general officer of 1914 — 1918 might have done — and spot battle and supply lines still visible running across high and low ground.

If you drove around there yourself, you’d see undulating farmland, maybe a few unusual hillocks — but it’s would be an exercise in frustration to try and piece together what happened between 1914 and 1918.

Some places require a guide to access. The Island of Montserrat is off limits since the place was essentially destroyed in a massive volcanic eruption. But you can visit guided by locals who were the victims of the disaster — a chance to explore their lives and resilience - while literally walking atop a still smoldering buried city, a modern Pompeii.

Indeed, Pompeii and Herculaneum are examples of sites that seem like they’d be easily navigated with a guidebook and some common sense. The reality, especially on a hot sticky day, is that these are complex archeological sites, that don’t easily yield their stories and you can spend many hours looking at ruins and missing the stories they tell. It’s smart and invigorating to explore them with someone who, literally, knows where the bodies are buried.

We toured Pompeii with Walks of Italy — around 10 people in our group guided by an archeologist with an intimate knowledge of Pompeii and what it represented as a provincial Roman city at the height of Rome’s imperial greatness.

In Herculaneum — we took a private tour with an archeologist and historian for Herculaneum tours.

Herculaneum is altogether quieter and more intimate then Pompeii — a wealthy town for the Roman elite and in many ways better preserved. Exploring the hidden lives of the Roman gentry — how they utilized toilet plumbing and rainwater — the murals they painted and the gods they worshipped — come alive in the hands of the right expert.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you wandering off on your own especially after your tour — and taking a closer look with some of the new knowledge you’ve gained.

So for VaVenturers - the small/individual expert tour is a smart use of your vacation budget.

Tour Guide or Do It Yourself?

When Travel Gives You Lemons — How to deal with the unexpected

Pret a Traveler — What to Wear