Adventures Abound

Welcome to our blog! Here you can read about some of our adventures and those of our clients as we travel the world. So sit back, enjoy a cup of coffee or diet coke (my favorite) and travel with us.

Our company is called Trips and Travel and we are both Travel Agents. Both R and I absolutely LOVE to travel. I've often said "give me 5 minutes and I'll be ready to travel anywhere!" As a child growing up in Kansas, I absolutely haunted the local library and read every book I could get my hands on about travel.

Our family took several vacations during the summer, but mostly to Colorado and to visit relatives. It was always fun to see new places and experience new food. But to this day I cannot drink Dr. Pepper because I got car sick (probably altitude sick) after drinking it during a trip. For months I would save up my allowance money for these trips. I still have the turquoise ring and bookmark I purchased during our last Colorado trip as a family.

During college, travel was scarce. . .mostly just trips to work and campus classes. But I did marry an Air Force Officer who promised to show me the world. It makes me smile because our first station was in Nebraska--certainly not far from Kansas.

But over time we did move--to Florida, Germany, Virginia, and Ohio. Living in Germany on the economy was quite a change in lifestyle from the States. Our two girls went to German schools; not something that most Americans did, but it was a wonderful experience. And it forced us to quickly learn German. To this day, my German is fairly good conversational German, but heaven help me if I have to be gramatically correct and pronounce those pesky umlauts! I still say that you can only learn to make those sounds if you learned them as a child. Luckily my girls did!

While in Germany we travelled everywhere possible--all over Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg, The Vatican, Holland, England, Scotland and other places I am sure will come to me later.

S did not especially want to go to England, so he finally told me that if I could get our car across on a ferry and arranged a two week tour, he would go. Little did he know! (I absolutely LOVE a challenge!) The next day I promptly went to a German travel agency and got us booked on a car ferry from Bruges, Belgium to Hull, England which is not a typical tourist route. But we wanted to visit Yorkshire and some of our mutual ancestral roots and they were near York. So logically, I thought starting in the middle of England would work for us. We discovered wonderful B&B's with full breakfasts that blew us away. And the hosts all loved the girls.

Our tour went from Yorkshire up to Scotland and the town of Jedburgh was expecially memorable. We could not find a B&B available, but the kind lady told me about her friend who had a big Victorian House who sometimes took in her overflow guests. So we stayed in a lovely home that night (it had a beautiful stained glass window on the stairway landing) and the girls had a ghostly experience. They slept in the room where the hosts daughters had grown up; their names were still on the outside of the door. During the night, my daughter G said that she felt a gentle hand on her and the covers being smoothed down. I had checked on them earlier, but not at 2 a.m. G never felt frightened, but instead was comforted.

From Jedburgh we went to St Andrews, up to Loch Lomond and then down the west side of Scotland and into England. My ancestral family is from Yorkshire and Manchester, so it was interesting to see the countryside. We stayed the night in Shakespeare's hometown, Straford-on-Avon which was lovely. Then on through London and to Kent where some of S's distant family lived.

We loved being in the countryside in Kent and being able to take the train into London. We did spend one evening at the theater and saw Agatha Christie's play "The Mousetrap". Agatha is one of my favorite authors, so it was a real treat.

Returning through Dover (yes, the cliffs really are white!) we caught a ferry and one of the girls turned green with motion sickness. I sure was glad that it did not last too long; then we were in France wending our way back to Germany.

R had a different experience. But I'll let him tell you about it in his own words.

Both R and I LOVE to travel and since we have been together, we have taken so many wonderful trips, both small and large. Our appetite for adventure is never ending.

So that is why I am a travel agent. If I cannot go on the vacation, I derive so much pleasure helping other people make their dreams come true. I guess an agent is part Mom, part big sister and best friend all rolled into one. We love having satisfied customers and will post pictures and info as the blog grows.