Liz and Adam
Liz Holden arranges individual vacations, creates big-picture group tour structure, and leads client engagement. She loves piecing together perfect itineraries like a puzzle, and spends way too long reading about hotel breakfasts. If you email us, it will be Liz who will likely reply. (And it will likely be so fast you'll think she's addicted to her email. You wouldn't be wrong.) Her background as a physics lecturer, a writer, and a roller derby player make her a quick-thinking multi-tasker who's always ready for the next challenge.
Adam Stanley is the group tour destination expert. His decades as a professor of history specializing in modern Europe have given him a depth of knowledge unmatched by the typical tour operator. He dives into his destination research and surfaces with unforgettable stories and unbelievable experiences. (Ask him about the guillotine--you won't forget his answer!) His walking tours brim with the same wit and wisdom he brings to his popular classroom lectures. He has an unsurpassable eye for the details that elevate vacations from good to great. (This same eye for detail also makes him excel as a roller derby referee.)
Adam's keen intelligence pairs perfectly with Liz's go-go enthusiasm. Curious how our business got its start? Scroll on to read our story.
Adam Stanley is the group tour destination expert. His decades as a professor of history specializing in modern Europe have given him a depth of knowledge unmatched by the typical tour operator. He dives into his destination research and surfaces with unforgettable stories and unbelievable experiences. (Ask him about the guillotine--you won't forget his answer!) His walking tours brim with the same wit and wisdom he brings to his popular classroom lectures. He has an unsurpassable eye for the details that elevate vacations from good to great. (This same eye for detail also makes him excel as a roller derby referee.)
Adam's keen intelligence pairs perfectly with Liz's go-go enthusiasm. Curious how our business got its start? Scroll on to read our story.
Liz
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Adam
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The Hounds
Evie
Theresa
Archer
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A Love Story
Liz and Adam met and fell in love only because they had each first fallen in love with European travel.
Liz in Amsterdam, 2000
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Liz first visited Europe in 2000, on a trip to the Netherlands to visit Dutch family members. She fell in love with Amsterdam at the first sight of the many orange-roofed houses, before the plane had even touched down. The canals, the stroopwafels, the skinny row houses, the quirky shops, the street performers: she loved it all. She spent the next several years going back to Europe whenever she had the chance. In 2010, freshly hired as a physics lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, she heard that the university was looking for instructors to lead short-term study abroad programs. Someone recommended she talk to Adam Stanley in the History Department for advice, as he had recently been the instructor for a short-term program to Greece. |
Adam at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, 2003
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Adam was no stranger to European travel. He spent the summer of 2003 in Paris and Berlin, doing research for his doctoral dissertation on gender and consumerism in interwar France and Germany. He really enjoyed Berlin, but it was Paris that claimed his heart, despite the fact that he was staying in an un-air-conditioned apartment during a brutal heat wave. Then, although they had yet to meet, in 2008 Liz and Adam were unknowingly in Europe simultaneously, just a three-hour train ride apart, as Adam took his daughter to Paris, while Liz and her sister visited Amsterdam. |
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Back at UW-Platteville in 2011, Liz reached out to Adam for advice about student study-abroad trips. When they met, she knew instantly that she not only would take travel advice from this man, she wanted to run the trip itself with him. They made plans to create a “History of Science in Europe” course, taking inspiration from both of their specialties. Their first trip with students--to the Netherlands and Germany--ran in the summer of 2012. |
Liz & Adam's first student group in Leiden, Netherlands, 2012
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Fast forward a few years and student trips later, and their years-long collaboration and friendship suddenly led seamlessly into romance. Adam proposed to Liz on a covered bridge in Leiden, Netherlands, in the middle of a rainstorm. (Liz later had an image of this bridge tattooed on her shoulder.) When they married the following year, many of their former study-abroad students attended the wedding. |
Liz & Adam's former study-abroad students at their wedding, 2015
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In the ensuing years, Liz and Adam have made many returns to Europe with new groups of students, visiting more than a dozen countries in the process. They’ve also spent plenty of time in Europe just for fun, including taking Quinn and Alissa (Adam’s kids, Liz’s stepkids) to Paris and Amsterdam--the two places that, outside the United States, represent “home” to Liz and Adam....
For years, whenever Liz and Adam described their student trips, people would say, “I wish I could go!” And so, after considering the possibility for several years, Liz and Adam decided to establish their own travel company, allowing them to invite anyone, not just current university students, to participate, and opening up the opportunity to lead trips focused on less strictly academic topics (spirits, anyone?). Join us on one of our group trips, and fall in love with Europe, yourself. It could change your life. |
Alissa, Adam, Quinn, and Liz in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, 2019
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Liz and Adam after getting their second Covid vaccine, looking forward to future safe travel, 2021
