Starting Over (or Again)

I just took a look at the site I started to share my travel stories, and…Holy Mackerel! I haven’t posted a thing in EIGHT YEARS. I have all the excuses ready: We sold our house and moved home to Montana. I continued to work in Alaska during the summer. We traveled. A lot. Then my loving spouse had heart surgery, and by the time they let him come home …Covid!

Despite all the excuses, in the end I just didn’t keep up with it.

Last week I was reading a story about telling stories, and realized how much I miss it. You see, for the last three summers I worked in Alaska, I was a Tour Director. I led up to 50 guests at a time on multi-day tours through Alaska and the Yukon-and I loved it! I had a captive audience, a microphone, and lots of time to tell stories. My guests loved it too (well, most of them), and the one comment I heard over and over again was how much they enjoyed my stories. I miss telling stories. And until our world of travel gets back to normal, this blog is the only way of telling those stories.

So I’m going to start again. This started off as a travel blog, but I think I’m going to morph it into a “stories about anything” blog. Some of the stories I told as a Tour Director are linked to specific places – it’s interesting to try timing a story so the punch line comes just as the subject of the story arrives in the window of our motor coach. I’m hoping I’ll be able to tell the stories along with descriptions of the places.

I also have a lot of years behind me, filled with adventures. I’ve lived in Alaska and Montana, but also California, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, and Washington. I’ve had at least four careers, not to mention random jobs. I’ve traveled to 37 countries, which is pretty good considering that just nine years ago the sum total of my international travel was Canada and Mexico. I’ve lived through natural disasters, and seen things that make me go, “Wow!”

So, here we go.