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Travel
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Descriptions of sites about tours in: | |||||||||||||
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Although Mark and I did a certain amount of traveling before we moved to Pasadena—a cross-country rail trip, for instance—we decided in early 2004 that we should get some serious travel done. I had had a health scare a year or so earlier, and we agreed that we should get as much travel in while I was still capable of it. Mark had been on the mailing list of Country Walkers for a while, and we started looking seriously at their brochures then, in 2004. The various special trips that we’ve taken are listed below in reverse chronological order: the most recent at the top, and the first, to Chile, at the bottom.
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As you see at the bottom of this page, in 2004 we started with Chile, in the Lakes District, and the next year we were in the Olympic National Park in Washington. These are two of the main three temperate rain forests of the world. Since Chile is so narrow, their rain forest is not large; the largest by far is the Pacific Northwest, which ranges from northern Califor- nia, north through Oregon, Washing- ton, and British Columbia all the way to the Alaskan panhandle. The third is Takayna, the Tarkine, hidden away in the hinterlands of Tasmania. And to Tasmania it was for us in 2018. Mark arranged two walking tours, one in the Freycinet Peninsula on the east coast of the island, one in the Tarkine, and this had the additional advantage of being combined with a photographic workshop. Read all about it. |
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Angkor! Vietnamese and Cambodian cuisine! The possibility of going to Indochina on a Country Walkers tour was too tempting to miss. It surprised us to find that Laos was the one of the three countries that grabbed us the hardest, but you’ll have to read all about that in the accounts that Mark and I have written about the trip we took in early November of 2016. My site has my pictures, or at least some of them, along with excerpts from my journal and more narrative besides. You’ll find links there to Mark’s account. |
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We were rather planning for 2014 to go on a Country Walkers tour involving a cruise on the Upper Amazon, when the much better offer from Mike and Cindy came. So Wait Till Next Year, we thought. But there was no such tour the Next Year. Instead, Mark did all the arranging, and we found ourselves in Lima on 13 April of 2015. Read all about it. |
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As a graduation present to Mason, Cindy and Mike decided on a trip to Japan, where Mike has five years’ experience. They kindly offered Mark and me the opportunity to tag along, and we jumped to accept. Two weeks, every day laid out carefully by Mike in a tour-de-force of planning. My pages are now up, see them here. Mark, of course, finished long before I did; here are his pages. |
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In the ordinary course of events, we might have been expected to take another trip later in 2012, but didn’t. The delay was due to Mark’s uncertainty about his job, but even before he found the new job, we had contracted to take a “VIP Tour” to the Isle of Skye in May of 2013, which would include two nights aboard the “Royal Scotsman”, a luxury train going from the North-east of Scotland down to Edinburgh. I’ve finally finished my pages describing the trip, and Mark’s have been done for quite a while. |
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Our trip to Hawai‘i in March 2012 was not under the auspices of Country Walkers, and was not strictly speaking a walking tour. When I got an invitation to give a talk at a professional meeting in Honolulu, I was informed that if I was flying off to a Tropical Island Paradise, I would not be going alone, and I would not be going for only the one-weekend duration of the meeting. As usual, Mark made all the arrangements, and they worked out very well indeed. Read about the trip in my pages and in Mark’s. |
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I’d been to Iceland in June of 1969,
and when Mark told me about the Country Walkers prototype walk there, with some saving on the cost, and fewer than the standard eighteen walkers, my reaction was hardly enthusiastic. Beautiful and exciting yes, but my recollections of the cuisine there were not positive. Nonetheless, I relented, and I am so glad that I did! We went to different places than I had in those days forty- one years ago, and the cooking has grown up. In fact, I had some of the best meals of my life there, as you’ll see when you read my pages, and Mark’s. |
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Everyone’s heard of the fantastic biological diversity of Costa Rica. We thought we should take advantage of Country Walkers’ tour there before too long. And we did this in December 2009, with great pleasure. We did not choose to do anything in the country beyond what was part of the tour, though, so we arrived two days before the start of the walk, and left a day after it ended. Mark has his Costa Rica pages and I have my pages, too. Enjoy them! |
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Our original idea of a walking tour was “Classic Tuscany”, one of the first that Country Walkers ever set up. But in 2004, the Chile trip was so attractive that we put Tuscany off. And put it off again and again. In late 2007, though, we decided to stop delaying. Venice and Ravenna would be two of our other travel targets, since Mark had never been to Venice, and both of us were eager to see the famous mosaics of Ravenna. Mark’s page, with his pictures and narrative, is now up on the web in the final version, and so is mine. |
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In November of 2007, our walking trip was to the South Island of New Zealand, and as I’ve reviewed the pictures I took during this marvelous excursion, I don’t think I’ve found a better one than this snap of Mark walking along the shore of Lake Wakatipu, to serve as a hint of what lovely countryside we walked through. Naturally, Mark has his pages, too. From his central page you will be able to get to his day-by-day descriptions of the trip. |
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Mark thought that I should use a picture of the Grand Mosque of Córdoba as representative of the glories of Andalucía, but I think this picture from the Lion Court in the Alhambra does just as well, maybe even better. But no matter: in October of 2006, we flew to Paris and took an overnight train from there to Madrid, thence to Granada, where we picked up the Country Walkers tour of Southern Spain. It was truly wonderful. As with the other trips, Mark has a web page devoted to pictures and I do, too. |
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In August of 2005, we went on a nice long driving trip, ultimate target being the Country Walkers tour in the Olympic National Park, both the rain-forest and the shore sections. Again, you can see the web pages for my pictures, and for Mark’s. |
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In our first trip, we left Halloween night of 2004 for a long triple of flights to Puerto Montt, Chile, and from there we went walking for six days in the Lakes District, already farther south than any of the world’s cities, except for Christchurch and Dunedin. Then an 800-mile flight southwards took us to Punta Arenas, from which we bussed to the Torres del Paine National Park. Both Mark and I have web pages, each showing only a fraction of the pictures we took in this spectacular country. |