Do you like to travel? Yeah, me too, although I don't do enough of it. However, I think I found the solution to being able to travel more frequently.
About a year ago, my friend, Nancy, asked me to go to a meeting with her to learn about how to travel for pennies on the dollar. Wouldn't you know? It was another one of those direct marketing schemes - or so I thought. After listening to the various speakers, I was mildly interested. Then, one by one, people started standing and telling about all the great travel packages that had gotten just because they bought the company's travel manual and acquired their own travel website. A bunch of them had just come back from the Dominican Republic. My friend talked about going to Las Vegas and getting a $159 room for $59. Then the hotel upgraded her to a suite!
So guess what? I joined. Now, I'm making money doing what I love. Next week I'm going to Colorado (got a heck of a deal on the air fare). I'll be visiting Eagle, Denver, Boulder, and a bedroom community called Broomfield where my brother and sister-in-law live.
My most recent trip was to Baltimore with my 14 year old granddaughter, Hillary, to see my 91 year old father. He's begging us to come again this summer, and I guess we will.
What I really want to do, though, is find one of those fabulous "agent only" trips (which sometimes allow me to bring a guest). These are trips that hotels and resorts offer so that we agents can get familiar with the places and then market them to our clients. The one I want to take is going to Paris, France. It includes round-trip airfare from either Boston (BOS) or New York (JFK) to Paris, transfers, accommodations at the Hotel Bredant, four continental breakfasts, one fine dinner, city tour, night cruise on the Seine and an escort to show the places of interest. And the price: $599! All I have to do is get some of my family trips out of the way, and I'm off!
Other trips I'll take this year? Seattle, to see a friend who moved. Salt Lake City to visit a cousin. Maybe Sebring, Ohio, to look at a piece of investment property.
My favorite trip? I went to London with a group of friends for seven days. Then, when everyone else went home, I rented a car and drove (on the "wrong" side of the road) around the British Isles for nearly two weeks. Whoa! Those roadways are something else. I was going 80 in the "slow" lane and people were honking at me to either speed up or get off the road. I ran over the curb a couple of times until I learned to make a left turn at a corner.
Ireland was the best! It really IS the Emerald Isle. I stayed with a marvelous family in their home, which was also a bed and breakfast. Twomey was their name. They cooked for me and their kids, a boy and a girl, danced Irish fold dances. They sang for me, and begged me to sing American fold tunes. Did I know any? Not really. I ended up singing "Down in the Valley" and "Old Dan Tucker" and "My Darling Clementine" - songs I learned in high school choir. The 80 year old grandmother, May, had lots of stories to tell about how she had come to the United States in the 1920's as a young woman. She was hired to be a nanny for a well-to-do family. When the stock market crashed, the family couldn't afford to keep her, and sent her home to County Cork. If she had stayed here, she wouldn't have married Mr. Twomey. Her son would not have been born, nor would her grandchildren.
Did you ever wonder how your life would be different if you had made even one decision differently? Well, maybe that's a subject for my next blog.
Be thankful. Watch The Secret. Read The Power of Now. And look for my book in a few months - 15 Seconds to World Peace.
