How to use Rick Steves’ walks in his guide book

Some of the walks in the books are also audioguides in the app (not all). We’ve used quite a few of those audioguides and I prefer that to reading from a book.

Thanks Barbara for the suggestion, but unfortunately none of the cities we are going to in Poland have any. We have used those before and they were great! Again, thanks for the reply.

Last month I did the Best of Poland tour and during our free time in Krakow, a friend and I explored Kazimierz using Rick’s guidebook walk of the neighborhood. I was the narrator but I didn’t read while walking—only once we arrived at each “stop”. Be careful out there :)

I don’t carry the entire guidebook, but rip out just the pages with the walking tour in question (and any other pages that I might want that day, like restaurant listings). So I rarely am carrying more than 10 pages. Rick actually recommends this method. I only read the descriptions or information when I stop.

Thanks for the great ideas. I like the idea of just having a few pages as that will be easy to deal with. I am very careful keeping an eye around me and this will definitely help. Again, thanks!

I have also made paper copies of the walks I plan to use. Sometimes I also enlarge the map part so my fading eyes can read them better. You can recycle the paper once you're done and you don't need to rip up the book.

I am bad at following his walks. So even though I have read through them, I can never follow them. Since other people can, I figure I am the problem.

I did the same thing as Accidental Southerner when we did the Best of Poland tour in May. We would walk from stop to stop, and I would then read what the book had to say about each location. I did skim a bit ahead, in case the book mentioned anything noteworthy along the way.

There is no way I could walk and read at the same time! I'm clumsy enough without deliberately not looking where I'm going.

Good ideas; thanks so much. I am thinking I would rather just have a few pages whether I tear them out or copy the walk as I totally look like a tourist with the book in front of my face. :):)

After reading the above, I started to wonder whether the Kindle Reader had screen reading functionality. I did a bit of research, opened my newly-downloaded Amsterdam & The Netherlands guidebook [on sale at the time for $3.99], configured the Kindle Assistive Reader, went to the Red Light District walking tour, turned on the reader, and voila - the text of the walk was being read to me.

This was on my Samsung Android tablet. To configure Assistive Reader, tap in the middle of the page to expose menu access, then tap on the "Aa" at the top right of the page - tap on More and turn on Assistive Reader and Real-time Text Highlighting. Back on the page, tap again in the center - the start button for Assistive Reader will appear at the bottom - tap it - you will hear the page being read. To select your starting point, press and hold on text at the desired point on the page - the selection menu should pop open - tap Play and it should start reading from that point. Tap again in the center of the page to pause.

Note that I did not have to configure the separate TalkBack screen reader on the Android Accessibility menu.

I don't have Kindle installed on the iPhone, so didn't try it, but it should work there as well. Seems easier than trying to read loose pages while walking around, but would require purchasing the electronic version of the guidebook, or perhaps downloading from your library.

Not as user friendly as the RS Audio Europe app, but for walking tours not available there...

It also occurred to me that you could try recording the spoken narration with the Voice Memos recorder on a separate device - that way you could record and save in advance, and be a bit easier to play back a recording rather than having to access the walk within the book.

markcw:
Wow! That is very interesting! I often wish I still had an old fashion tape recorder that I could just stick in my pocket with the recording of the walk on it, but those are long gone!

Thanks so much for the suggestion!

Some smartphones have voice recorders if you want to create your own audio walking tour. Here’s some info on iPhone.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/make-a-recording-iph4d2a39a3b/ios