The pages of the August Gazette have often included tales of townsfolk’s summer vacations. One issue at summer’s end contained six accounts – a description of a student’s trip to Paris, another child’s cross-country adventure, the Seniors’ excursion on Narragansett Bay, a business venture to Mexico, one family’s journey to Poland to discover their roots, and another family’s decision to make a trip to the “Elysian Fields” of France, permanent.  Budapest, Puerto Rico, Russia, Barbados, Canada, Machu Picchu, China, Iceland, Bali, Scotland, England, Ireland, Australia have been among the faraway places we’ve visited and wrote of for our neighbors.

Some travelers have returned to the homelands of their ancestry – Ernie Loew who returned to the Germany from which his family escaped during World War II, and Felix Winters who, on his trip, “was reminded of the tragedies and the glories of the Polish past.”  Others, like the Kinzers, have relayed tales of time spent as missionaries in places like Kenya.  Teachers have shared with their students and with our readers the experience of spending a few weeks on the Hopi and Navaho reservations, the French class recounted their travels in France, the Spanish class, in Spain. Gloria and Kathleen Burell shared their experiences in Italy, including the ultimate — an encounter (three, actually) with the Pope. Harold Haraghey celebrated with us his “Grand Slam”, which took him hunting in the Canadian Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Wyoming, Hermosillo, Mexico, and lastly Reno to receive a plaque for his accomplishments.

Some of our stories of travels are humorous. In this year’s “The Intrepid Traveler” Angela Fichter, noting one of the troubles with “Red-eye Flights”, relayed the time she ran onto the tarmac to chase a taxiing plane she missed, which subsequently stopped, lowered the stairs, and let her board.  In “There’s No Place Like Home”, Michael Winters wrote of traveling through Europe where “Murphy’s Law” applied a little too often and included missing trains and missing family members.  In “Life on a Houseboat at the End of the World”, Diane Meade reported on the breach of her personal motto, “never go on vacation to a place more remote than Hampton”; and in “A Connecticut Yankee South of the Border”, Gordon Hansen recounted the time he mistook tremors that wakened him in Mexico City for a case of “Montezuma’s Revenge”, and the “short-lived relief” of discovering “Thank God, I’m not sick – it’s an earthquake.”

Travelers have also shared tales of their vacations in the United States, from the eastern most point of Maine to the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition at Cape Disappointment, south to Disney World and north to Alaska. We’re not the only family to share our cross country excursions. In 2010, the Wakely’s chronicled Paul’s bicycle trip along the Trans America Bicycle Trail, coast to coast, from the Atlantic Ocean in Yorktown, Virginia to the Pacific in Florence, Oregon, 4133 miles through the mountains, rivers, plains and deserts of ten states.  Our family shared ours in annual increments: across the southwest from San Diego to San Antonio; northwest from Yellowstone to the Bad Lands, around the Four Corners; along the Mississippi River from Hannibal to New Orleans; and throughout the entire east and west coasts.

A favorite series was “Janet’s Journal”, monthly installments from June 2007 to October 2008 which described the Robertson’s trips around the world, starting with traversing the locks on a canal trip in Wales, which included navigating “stair steps” and the eventual destruction of the “Ethel Mary”, a catastrophe so unusual to the Welsh that the word “sank” had to be spelled to be believed. “Janet’s Journal” took us to Barcelona, Venice, Paris and England, and on a freighter to Panama, Guam, the Philippines, Kenya, South Africa, China, and Taiwan where they temporarily lost their son “in the wilds of who knows where” upon their arrival, and left in a typhoon.  The journal detailed a 19 course meal in Korea, the “otherness” of Japan, the thrill of seeing Mount Everest and the Taj Mahal, and the “staggering contrasts” of India, relaying scenes of unimaginable poverty and the people’s “kinship with a spiritual side of life”.  It was a farewell gift to Hampton, “the home we always dreamed of”, from one of the Gazette’s founders, who has kept, from time to time, her promise to return.

That’s the theme common to all of our travelers: we’re always happy to come home.