This is the travel webpage of Bob and Cathy Smith.
The two of us on a game drive jeep in South Africa, Oct. 2011
We hope you enjoy sharing our travel adventures and that you may learn from our experiences and develop your own dreams as a result. The world is an exciting place!
Cathy and I retired 90 minutes apart on May 31, 2008. Cathy has been retired the longest (she got home 90 minutes before me). When I walked in the door, I said to her, "Okay, here we are. NOW what do we do?"
The answer was not hard to come by. We have loved to travel all our lives. We dreamed, planned and methodically saved for the day when we would be able to enjoy the freedom to travel pretty much when and where we wanted and in our own independent style.
We have learned methods of researching travel destinations, travelling on a budget and how to travel independently on our own terms.
What we have learned has resulted in a series of travel adventures large and small. These experiences have been grander than we could ever imagine and have created life-long memories aided by fantastic photos and journals.
The purpose of this website is to share these experiences as much as we can and to answer the many requests we get from family, friends and acquaintances for information, photos and how we succeed in travelling "off the beaten path."
Off The Beaten Path
In 2008 we intended to avoid cruise ships and tours entirely.
In our travels before retirement, we had watched in horror as tour groups were herded like penguins at stereotypical tourist-trap locations. Our instinct was to grab as many of the victims as possible and help them escape. Since then, we have learned that tours at specific points of interest are beneficial. We also recently learned that an entire vacation tour with plenty of free and independent time to explore on our own is possible and even cost effective for certain places.
The TV series "Love Boat" led us to believe that cruises are for people who have no desire for natural adventure and who want to dress up and pretend to be celebrities. Having taken one high quality cruise, we learned we were right, although since we were with friends, the experience was okay. In certain circumstances and locations we would consider a cruise if it would give us off-the-boat experiences we could not practically do better on our own. If we could do it better on our own, we'd skip the ship.
In general, if you were to follow us on a vacation, you would notice that we have the tendency to find exciting places and adventures where tourists don't go. We usually travel in a group of two and like it that way. We would rather explore a native street market than a cathedral. We would rather have a conversation with a local than fellow tourists. And we would rather eat authentic local fare at out-of-the-way restaurants where there are no tourists, than to find "steak-and-taters".
