Because Great Britain is regarded by Americans as the most important trans-Atlantic destination, it behooves us all to stay current with touristic developments there, both for the purpose of recommending visits by others, or for affecting our own vacation plans.  And among those developments, the British are claiming that the ability of tourists to visit, and even use, some of the facilities that were built for the London Olympics of 2012 is a new and potent reason for a visit.

     Starting July 27, the one-year anniversary of the start of the 2012 Olympics, the British will open the Queen Elizabeth Olympics Park, which they claim will be the world's largest new park.  It's an area of London that encompasses most of the major stadiums and other sports arenas (including the structures housing giant swimming pools), of which most will now be open to visits by the public (imagine yourself sprinting around the quarter-mile track used by long-distance Olympics competitors).  In fact, if I understand correctly a recent statement by a spokesperson of VisitBritain (official government tourist office of Great Britain), it will now even be possible for members of the public to splash away in the famous Olympics-size swimming pools of those 2012 games.

     Visitors will be able to arrange their own direct visits to the Olympics Park, or they will be able to sign up for commercial visits offered by tour operators as part of their standard half-day or full-day tours of London.

     Another major London attraction--the London Shard--is already open to the public and has been admitting visitors since February of this year (several million persons a year are expected to visit it).

     And what is the London Shard?  It's an immense skyscraper of unprecedented height for Britain, which got that name in the many violent attacks upon the decision to build it several years ago, when opponents claimed it would resemble a glass Shard--they meant this negatively, and feared a disturbing architectural interference with the traditional look of London.  Sponsors of the project thereupon adopted the name "Shard" as a positive term to explain what they were building.

     The London Shard is now the tallest building in the European Union, an Empire State-like structure 95 stories high, its surface almost totally of glass, and located near London Bridge, in what might be considered the heart of London.  Designed by famous Italian architect, Renzo Piano, it now towers over London in the same way that the Empire State Building hovers over Manhattan.  And it has a four-story high observation platform on its 72nd floor, from which visitors will have a hitherto-unavailable view extending for many miles around London.  I've heard one claim that you'll actually be able to see Oxford from the London Shard, but haven't been able to confirm that possibly-overambitious assertion.

     Admission to the observation platform of The London Shard will be the equivalent of $35, but despite that high tab, the building's owners are expecting visits by millions of residents and tourists.  And London tourist officials are hoping that the Shard will now become an outstanding attraction of the city, in the same way that the Empire State Building is often regarded as the most important and popular sight to visit in New York.

     How can you best prepare for a visit to Britain?  In a recent meeting I had with the marketing director of VisitBritain, it was stressed that one of that organization's most potent aids to visitors is its special website called VisitBritainShop.com.  There, the British tourist office offers substantial discounts to persons who make advance purchases of some of the transportation schemes--like the London Oyster Card enabling multiple London subway trips for less--and admission tickets to important attractions.  Though some of these devices can also be purchased at the various London airports on arrival, purchasing them in advance through VisitBritainShop.com permits you to avoid the long lines that sometimes form at the airport shops selling them, in addition to saving you money.  Another related website, VisitBritain.com (without the word "shop") supplies general information on travel to Britain, as does the website of British Airways, BA.com, which supplements its sale of air tickets with that advice.  Consulting all three websites in advance of your trip may prove highly advantageous.

The news that a Florida law firm has brought a class action suit against Spirit Airlines has caused a great many consumer advocates to smile.  For several years now, they've been complaining that Spirit's aggressive creation of novel fees and expenses has gone too far, essentially preventing the public from realizing how high that budget airline has raised its fares. The Florida plaintiffs are complaining that Spirit left the mistaken impression that certain of its "user fees" were required by federal law; in reality, alleges the lawsuit, these fees were a purely voluntary creation of Spirit and had nothing to do with government regulations. We'll all watch with interest the outcome of what is bound to be a hotly-contested litigation.

I wrote yesterday about the decision of Celebrity Cruises to permit a cruise broker to charge as little as $43 a day for a 15-day "repositioning cruise" of one of its ships across the Atlantic, from England to Florida; and I called that rate "historic" for a ship of Celebrity's calibre. There are, of course, other dirt-cheap repositioning cruises scheduled for this autumn at less than $43 a day, but on standard vessels of Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian and MSC. It is the high quality of Celebrity's Constellation (the ship in question) that makes $43 so remarkable.

If you were to ask an experienced cruise passenger to identify the cruiselines that cater most to mature and elderly passengers, they'd answer in a flash that the ships of Holland America fit that bill. My daughter, in a blog post published last week in the Toronto Star, points out that the super-deluxe and so-called "premium" ships are also the vessels favored by super-annuated people -- ships like those of Seabourn, Regent, Seven Seas. Sedate river cruises are next in line. And which ships do younger passengers favor? According to Pauline, they like short cruises of almost any standard line going to the Bahamas and the Caribbean, or cruises scheduled for college breaks.

I was in England just prior to, and during the first several days of, the Olympics, and experienced the marvelous weather that spread over the British Isles at that time, a succession of sunshiny, rain-lacking days that you too seldom see there. The heavens created such a perfect background for television coverage that Britain must surely enjoy an upsurge in its tourism in the weeks ahead. And what was also unusual at that time, as pointed out to me by a colleague, was that Londoners were actually talking to one another. They were so hyped by the success of the games that they became more like Frenchmen than Brits. We'll see if that atmosphere carries over to the Fall.

In both Oxford and Bath, where I spent the stay, I was constantly impressed by the central locations and excellent amenities of the low-cost Travelodges in those cities. Travelodge in Britain (which has no connection to the Travelodge chain in the States) is an extraordinary budget find, charging rarely more than the equivalent of $60 a night for a double room -- an excellent rate for that often pricey nation. New Travelodge hotels are constantly springing up in other British cities (including London), and might be tops on your list for your own next trip to Britain. Incidentally, savoring brewed tea with scones (and strawberry jam) is a particular delight of visiting the occasional coffee shop in Britain; the experience reminds you of how much we have lost by making do with teabags in place of the arduous procedures of preparing a real cup of brewed tea.

They have just issued the catalogue of one-week courses for the Oxford Experience in July and August of 2013, and the course titles make me yearn to return. For one exciting week, you can sit in the living room of an Oxford don, in the medieval college created by Cardinal Wolsey and Henry the Eighth, and study the following: "The Beatles: Popular Music and Sixties Britain," or "The Age of Churchill," "British Spies in Fact and Fiction," "An Introduction to Particle Physics," "From Rasputin to Putin -- The Russian Enigma," or many more. Each week of a six week program features 11 totally different subjects, for which the one-week tab (covering everything other than your airfare to Britain) is about $1,800 per person, including wine with three of your 18 meals, comfortable rooms, afternoon excursions, and additional evening lectures on general subjects. Look up the "Oxford Experience." 

Some 200 years ago, the aristocracy of England came to the city of Bath to vacation and have fun.  The younger visitors flirted with each other at nightly balls and dances and became engaged, the older ones gambled at various card and board games and horse races, had sumptuous meals, and attended endless soirees; and all of them "took the waters" at the Roman-era baths in the center of town.

Those visitors were brought to the health-giving liquids of Bath in sedan chairs carrying a single person held aloft by two bearers.They arrived for their daily dousings as early as 6 a.m. and remained immersed up to their chins for two hours, then whiled away the time until around 11 a.m., when they immediately proceeded to have a six-course lunch.

Some 200 years later, my wife and I arrived in Bath for a short stay following our wholly-commendable weeklong studies at Oxford University.  Though Bath is no longer confined to the rich, it is still known as a pleasure capital of Britain, and you come here for mindless entertainment and not for enlightenment. Bath still has a famous racetrack, in addition to several theaters and even more museums.  It has 80 hotels and 200 bed-and-breakfasts, a giant and sumptuous abbey (of cathedral proportions) that must be visited, an enormous outlying shopping center in addition to countless chic downtown stores, several wealthy townhouse districts of the most impressive architectural beauty; and most important, it still has those famous Roman baths surrounded by more modern bath establishments in which modern visitors soak (in mineral waters and fiercely hot steam baths) for the purposes of health.

Actually, the 2,000-year-old Roman Baths are more important for their archeaological attributes than for actual bathing purposes.  When you descend staircases to examine the digs that were undertaken beneath and adjacent to the baths, you see remains of the actual time when Rome occupied Britain and Roman soldiers policed the land.  Not even in Rome have I ever seen such graphic and understandable evidence of the way in which life was actually experienced in those times.  The bas reliefs, the sculptures, the household implements and furnishings, are so compelling that you find yourself more focused on them than on the swimming-pool-like baths filled with their mineral-infused waters.

Fifty yards away from the Roman baths are the modern Thermae Baths using the same mineral waters, in which current-day visitors spend several hours of their stay, as we did.

I have a plane to catch (we fly home in a few hours) and will desist from further descriptions of the Jane Austen Centre (two of her novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, were set in Bath; www.janeausten.co.uk), of the Royal Crescent and the somewhat similar Circus (circular housing estates), the remarkable fashion museum (surely the best in the world), the Pump Room (where we enjoyed brewed tea and scones), the awesome Abbey, and much more.  That portion of the Frommer's guides devoted to Bath contains ample descriptions of affordable bed-and-breakfasts, and you have no excuse for failing to include Bath on your own next trip to the British Isles.

I have just concluded the first four days of a weeklong stay at Christ Church College in Oxford, England, where I am enrolled in the "Oxford  Experience," the world's most famous learning vacation.

My course of study, formally called "Virginia Woolf and Her Circle," relates to the Bloomsbury Group, those remarkable British authors, artists, philosophers and economists of the early twentieth century who set out to challenge the accepted social, political, and sexual mores of Victorian England.  They were, among others, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, John Maynard Keynes, and others.

We meet each day in the living room of an apartment assigned to an Oxford don (a tutor or professor) in one of the awesome sixteenth century buildings of a college that was planned by Cardinal Wolsey and completed by Henry VIII.  There we discuss and argue the texts of four outstanding Bloomsbury books from 9:15a.m. to 1p.m., breaking only for coffee about halfway through each morning.  Those sessions can only be described as intellectual fireworks.  You do not become a don at Oxford unless you are an outstanding scholar of proven quality, and our don is like a combination of the English department heads of Yale, Harvard and Princeton in one person, sprinkled with a bit of Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin. 

Other students in our group (half from the U.S.; others from France, Italy, and Australia; a few from Britain) are pursuing courses ranging from Particle Physics, to The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, to the History of the B.B.C., and The Brain and Its Senses.  We meet for meals in the Harry Potter Dining Hall (yes, it's the one from the first movie in the series), and also attend evening lectures on a variety of other subjects in other buildings looking down on the several quads that make up Christ Church College.  I want to pinch myself when I walk through a setting that hasn't changed at all since the year 1549 (other Oxford colleges date to the 1200s).

Because this blog deals with travel and not with academic matters, I won't go on about the nature of the experience itself.  But so you can decide whether you'd like to attend one of the six weeks of courses scheduled for 2013, I should tell you something about the cost of coming here to participate in an extraordinary adventure.

The seven days and six nights cost around $300 per night (not including airfare to Britain).  That sum brings you:  all tuition for the classes you take, six nights of accommodation in a comfortable student residence where you also receive the services of a "scout" who makes the bed and cleans the room each morning, three gigantic meals a day in the Harry Potter Dining Hall, daily escorted sightseeing of Oxford itself and other sights and famous palaces and stately homes outside of Oxford (which are optional, free activities scheduled for each afternoon), wine with your meals three times a week and at two extra wine receptions scheduled for each week, evening lectures most nights delivered by other famous Oxford Dons, and constant coffee breaks each morning, and again at night in various college halls.  I count that a pretty hefty return against the $300 a night you are spending.  It compares with the meals and escorted sightseeing you'd receive from standard tour operators, but it also includes those incomparable daily classes and other intellectual activities brought to you by distinguished teachers.

I'll be writing a greater length about the program scheduled for 2013.  I will myself try to come back for more, and can't imagine why other intellectually curious Americans might not want to do the same. Here is a vacation activity that towers over almost any other you might consider.