“Bob and Ro’s Excellent Adventure” was going to be the title of the travel blog that my wife, Rosemary, and I were going to write during our upcoming travels around the world. Then came Covid, and travel stopped abruptly and completely (the day after our return from Mazatlan). Shortly after the pandemic hit, we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. It struck me that the blog title was not a bad metaphor for those 50 years, so we decided to share our travel experiences with anyone who wants to read about them, but with a slight focus on those issues that are of primary concern to senior travelers.
Over the 50+ years of our lives together, we have done a lot of traveling, met a lot of interesting people, shared a lot of exciting experiences, and had a lot of fun, so we hope this collection of “lots” may be of interest to others. These experiences shaped us, as is true of everyone. One of our goals in writing this blog is to describe some of the significant formative interactions that made us what we are today – 70-somethings still happily married and looking forward to the day when unrestricted travel can begin again. That appears to be soon, as we have both received our covid vaccinations, and we are again planning our travels.
Another goal of this blog is to open minds to the value of travel. We are not talking about travel as spending a week at an all-inclusive beach resort in another country where we never have to use another language and where all of our fellow guests are other Americans (or rich, English-speaking foreigners). For us, travel means going places where we meet the natives, converse with them in their language, and learn about how they view life. Relatively few Americans do this kind of travel, and even fewer learn another language. Too bad for them since they miss out on so much the world has to offer. But we don’t mean to preach – just to suggest that there are other ways to view life, and who is to say that ours is always the best?
So, we decided to start our blog now with a mix of recent and local trips, and then we hope you will continue to follow us during and after our continuing adventures. Over the next two years, our plans include trips to Costa Rica, Mexico, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, the UK, Scandinavia, South America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii. For the end of 2021, we have booked cruises from the west coast through the Panama Canal, Tampa to the western Caribbean, and Port Canaveral to the Bahamas. In the near future, we hope to do cruises in the Adriatic, Baltic, and South Pacific. We also have drafted plans for a driving tour of much of the US and Canada. Please tune in as we complete these adventures.
The homepage picture is us in Machu Picchu in the spring of 2019, so our first post will include the trip that took us there.
Bob and Ro's Excellent Adventure 