"TRAVEL OPENS YOUR HEART,
BROADENS YOUR MIND,
AND FILLS YOUR LIFE WITH STORIES TO TELL."
Paula Bendfeldt
Reflection
Putting together this scrapbook has allowed me to relive our visit to Sicily. It’s been fascinating to see the different nuances that affected me during this distanced reflection. Neither Kevin nor I have any Sicilian roots in our ancestry, but you can’t visit this beautiful island without taking a bit of it home with you in a corner of your heart.
Frequent Travel Status...
Where are we going next?
Looking ahead and wanting to explore more of Europe, Kevin created a spreadsheet of the most active Rick Steves' tours and we made our own rankings individually. From the combined lists, we prioritized our future trips!
We will be in Portugal in early April, 2025 and back in Italy in the fall. We know there will be great stories to tell of our new adventures!
Teri's List
It's Greek to Me!
As I mentioned on the Home Page, we also took the Rick Steves' Athens & the Heart of Greece in 14 Days tour in 2024. It was fabulous and reminded us about the incredible influence the Greek culture had on Western culture. Also, the amount of military conquests and colonization the Greeks practiced throughout history became very apparent as we traveled throughout Sicily. We saw many structures originally built by the Greeks that have left a lasting impression on the landscape of Sicily. The sites on these two 2024 Rick Steves' trips turned out to be very complementary to one another.
Here are some photo comparisons below of Greek ruins in Greece and Sicily. Along with the antiquities, I've also included a couple of other visual comparisons I captured with my camera.
It's a Small World After All...
It's amazing to be halfway around the world and discover the connections we have with one another. We really are just characters in the same story!
While on our Rick Steves' Best of the Adriatic in 14 Days tour in 2023, we discovered a couple in our group from California had the last name that matched a car dealership in our town of Eureka, IL. When I mentioned it to them, Keith said he grew up on a farm a few miles outside of Eureka! He also shared that his stepdad lives in one of the nursing homes in Eureka. We shared that our son works at that nursing home!
A few months after our trip, Keith and Ann visited Eureka to celebrate his stepfather's 100th birthday. We met them for breakfast at a restaurant across the road from the car dealership that shares their name and took a group picture in front of the sign!
We came full circle with this connection!
WOW!
While on our Greece tour in the spring of 2024, I shared with the my buddy, Darin, where I grew up in Illinois. Darin and his spouse live part of the year in St. Louis and part in California. He told me he only knew one person from my hometown and it's his best friend. As it turns out, she grew up across the street from our family and her brother graduated with me. He was best friends with my brothers!
I didn't experience such serendipity on our trip to Sicily, but I hold out the possibility for future trips. I feel like travel has a way of connecting us through common experiences, and it brings the realization that no matter where we live, we're really not that separated from one another.
It is indeed a small world!!