When deciding between visiting two of the world's most famous seats of higher learning - Cambridge or Oxford - travel writer Jan DeGrass took a friend's advice to take "light and elegant" over "gloomy and depressing." The day-long visit to Cambrige, England is detailed in the newest travel story at www.Trave-Wise.com

"Though academia sets the tone, the (English) city is so much more than Cambridge university colleges, as we found out during a full day of sightseeing," writes Jan. The day started downtown across from an oddly named park: Christ's Pieces.

"Cambridge is an angular city full of geometrically correct buildings, manicured squares of lawn, green quadrangles and dramatic spires."

Passing through the gates of King's College leads to one of the most well-known past-times - punting on the Cam River in small, flat punts. You can even rent your own punt boat to join the generations of punters who leisurely ply the waterway as long you avoid the reserved section of the river reserved for Cambridge's famous rowing team.

Away from the water, you can find stunning architecture such as Church of Holy Sepulchre, one of England's four surviving Norman round churches built after the Knights Templar returned from the Holy Land.

Outside Cambridge, Grantchester offers its pubs in a pastoral setting - "cream teams among the apple trees." Notable poets and authors such as Rupert Brooke, Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf frequented Grantchester's farmhouse teashop - The Orchard.

"For me, the big attraction of Cambridge was not its splendid colleges or even its thriving outdoor market," says Jan.

"On Trinity Street opposite the colleges, I was drawn into the orbit of what is billed as the oldest bookshop site in Britain, home of the Cambridge University Press. You might imagine a fusty place of ancient tomes - given that scholars first arrived at this location in 1209 - but this bright, modern, relaxing store, so seductive to bibliophiles, is crammed with the world's most erudite texts on every subject from paleoethnobotany to the birth of the blues."

Jan concludes that "it is possible to self guide around Cambridge - sights and shopping are all within walking distance."

"We took ourselves on a brief tour of St. John's College (founded 1511) where students clattered busily across its quaint Bridge of Sighs modelled after Venice. It was truly picturesque."

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