I love to travel......think it started when I was 5 years old. I was born & raised in Los Angeles (San Fernando Valley). My parents didn't have much money but my grandparents helped my mom & I travel back to Topeka Kansas every summer to visit them & stay for the summer. They loved to drive around & see the country back there so I got to see it too......all the historical mid-west places along with the Eisenhower museum when it was first built (yep, I'm that old)......will never forget my first summer there we were driving out in the country & we stopped to watch a farmer with his columbine harvesting his wheat crop......he actually came up to our car & gave me a ride several times up & back on the huge columbine machine.....what a thrill that was for this city girl. I spent my summers from the age of 5 until I was 16 in Kansas & one time we actually took a trip up to Nebraska to visit some of my Dad's family on their farms.....after that, I never wanted to live in the city again.....but my parents wouldn't move away from where my Dad was finally working.

I think we took one road trip up to San Francisco but mostly growing up the only traveling I did was back to Kansas.

That travel bug never went away however. One of the first trips I went on after I was married was to Italy....it was a business trip for my H & I tagged along realizing that I would NEVER get an opportunity like that again since I was still working on my degree & we didn't have a family started yet.....I was totally free to wander around Rome for 5 weeks. I investigated every little place I could find to wander into & talked to as many of the local's as I could given that I was able to speak spanish & only a few words of Italian, I got by very well. We took one long weekend & drove to Sienna & stayed in a quaint little hotel with the bathroom down the hall. We had planned on going south for a long weekend to see Pompeii, but H got a bug in his rear that he wanted to get back to the states because he couldn't stand missing Thanksgiving dinner with his parents.......I had such bad jet lag on my return home that I couldn't even go to the thanksgiving dinner & I was angry with him for being such a jerk anyway (I now understand what made him the jerk he was....but that's a whole other novel to write)

Skiing became our winter 2 week vacation & we purchased a time share condo in Jackson Hole Wyoming......we spent every winter there for almost 20 years & we took my parents & our daughter along & ended up having a few friends that lived there that we met over the years.

Every once in awhile we would trade the time share for another place. Spent a week in Sedona Arizona just before Thanksgiving one year.....it snowed & we took a hot air balloon ride over the indian ruins......very fascinating & on the drive home....the Grand Canyon was gorgeous all snow covered.

Oh yes, one long weekend before I got married, I decided that I had never seen the Grand Canyon, one night when we had a thunder storm & it reminded me of the Grand canyon Suite....came home & told my mother I was going to take a plane trip to the Grand Canyon....she could come along if she wanted. We ended up taking the mule ride down to the plateau just above the river. The evenings were interesting as there were little skunks running all over the place, tipping over the trash cans.....it was a fun experience.

When first married, we did a lot of back packing into the Sierra's & when we first bought out time share in Jackson Hole, we spent a week backpacking into the Teton range.....gorgeous photos I got (before digital cameras)

We also traded our Time share for 2 weeks in Utah in September for my mother's birthday right after my Dad died......We gave her a beautiful hot air balloon ride over all the fall color changed trees out of Park City. The previous week we had spend in a very rustic time share cabin in another little town outside of Salt Lake up in the mountains.

We also traded our time share a couple of other times & ended up going into northern California's gold country....& we were at Calavaris county on the 4th of July.......fun watching their fire works...the brush was so dry that they actually started a fire on the mountain behind the fair grounds. While there we enjoyed doing a 500 foot repell into Moning Cavern & then spelunking through the caves at the bottom after doing the repell. I enjoyed doing that several times & our daughter enjoyed doing that with me. We did that 2 times once when our daughter was older & could join us with the repell.

Another wonderful ski trip we made was to Banff Canada & the little town just south of that where they had the cross country winter olympics. I loved to drive & wanted to see the country around Banff......ended up driving a long distance but wanted to see the Athabaska glacier......whad an experience.

One other travel experience was with a small group of people I worked with....we decided to take a long weekend trip down to Cabo San LUcas.....that was definitely an interesting trip to see how rough the Pacific ocean was & how calm the Sea of Cortez was. We were only there for 3 days but it was an interesting experience.....got eaten alive by sand fleas on the beach where everyone (other than me) went snorkeling.

My final trip.....the grand finale to my marriage, I purchased a farm 2100 miles away from California....& I ended up driving a medium size moving truck across the country....just me & my dog Leo.....that was 7 years ago. I haven't had money to travel since then....but I live in a place like I always had to vacation to. I have a friend who has 30 miles of horse riding trails on their farm which is only 20 minutes away from my farm. We take a few road trips around the local areas so that I can see the surrounding area. I have never seen the East coast....maybe some year....but right now there is no money other than for survival & for house repairs....& for the divorce......I may never get back to California to bring the things (including many of my cloths) that I left there when it feels like I escaped......life goes on & even if I don't travel like I used to, I'm so much happier than I ever was in that marriage & that's what really counts in life!!!!