Katherine was born with a sense of adventure and it appears that it was latent in Michael. We began our traveling life together in the early 70's by camping around the southwest US and crowned these trips by backpacking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. However, our camping adventures ended after a bear toured our camp and ripped open our ice chest during a trip to Yosemite. Michael said that that would be the last time there would be no more than fabric between him and animals around us. Fortunately, our financial situation improved enough to allow us to move from tents to hotels.
While we have toured the US fairly extensively, Katherine's international travel for business in the early 1980's bolstered us enough to do a three-week trip to Europe in 1985. We rented a car and drove from Munich through Switzerland, down through the eastern side of France to the Riviera, down the western coast of Italy to Florence, back to Lake Guarda in northern Italy, then through Austria and finally back to Munich. It is still one of our best trips. And it showed us just how easy it all was to do. After that we took at least one long vacation every year to various parts of Europe including at least 10 trips to Italy, our favorite place.
Then in 1997 Katherine had an opportunity to work in Tokyo and took the assignment as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
While in Tokyo we took the opportunity to travel extensively in Japan and Asia. Four wonderful years later she had another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to London, rather than back to the US. We used the time there to visit the UK and eastern Europe. We finally returned to the US in 2006 and are now contemplating new adventures.
We've done extensive travel in Europe and have visited Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Iceland, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Our travels outside of the US have taken us to Africa, Argentina, Bali, Beijing, Bhutan, Egypt, Great Barrier Reef, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Nepal, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam and just recently to Morocco. And this is only the travel we have done for pleasure. Katherine's business travels have taken her to many more places.
Over the years, Katherine has collected an extensive library of travel books and always uses them as her starting guide in planning a trip. She now supplements the information with that obtained from the Internet. We try to plan ahead but have booked a number of trips weeks, or even days before departure.
There are still a lot of other places on our 'A' list, many in Asia, that we have wanted to visit but have not gone primarily because of political unrest. These would include Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Sumatra and Borneo to name a few. However, now that we are based in the US, we are developing a whole new list of 'must see' places.
While we don't generally do adventure travel, we can certainly understand the appeal of going to exotic places to do such things as mountain climbing or river rafting. However, we are not only not into trekking we are not sure why anybody else is either. There is more on this in our 'observations.'
And, finally, we also make no illusions about the depth of our knowledge about various places we've been. Katherine is usually diligent about reading the books beforehand but Mike is only generally interested until we actually get there. And then there's the plethora of information you get from your guide. Mike will never remember any of that. He reacts to what is interesting visually and then photographs it. If you want detailed information about somewhere, and we would surely encourage you to get it, get some of the many books written by people who have researched it. And in today's world, every conceivable piece of information about some location is available on the internet.
What we are offering on this website is our insight into travel to a variety of places we have been. What is it about the place that makes it interesting? What should you look for? More important, we have been to many places so there is a common thread or a common reference point throughout all our discussions. In all its simplicity, we will try to offer you enough information about a place for you to decide if you should you go there.