U3A Travel Group enjoyed their meeting on Thursday, 24 March 2016

New England States of America

Lesley spoke about her trip to Canada & the USA last year. Included in her holiday was an 8 day Trafalgar tour of the New England States visiting Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The tour commenced and finished in Boston. She was a little disappointed that she didn’t see much of the autumn colours although on reflection she had seen more than she realised after viewing her photos. She showed us a number of photos of the places visited and one was to the tourist spot of Bar Harbour.

Following on from Lesley’s presentation we had a session on “Your worst travel incident” and several members spoke on this subject. Pat Osman had a bad experience of trying to catch up with one of her tours and advised us to always leave one day free in between tours if you are doing back-to-back tours. We were told about a stolen passport in Turkey, arriving in a country in the middle of a military coup, bad information regarding entry visas into Spain, and a passenger dying on a trip, plus missing a bomb by 5 minutes and also missing a cholera epidemic by 2 days! One very lucky lady!

After morning tea Kaye entertained us with some very graphic photographs of the time she spent living in Chicago and encountering the Great Chicago snow blizzard of 1967 where 23” of snow fell in just one day. The whole of the city ground to a halt and there was no power. To remove the snow it was later packed into rail carriages and sent south to Texas and Florida. An ice storm then followed with temperatures as low as -33C and with the wind-chill factor it became -64C!
After living in Chicago for 35 years she and her husband decided to move to Florida but that wasn’t without trouble either as they encountered three hurricanes whilst living there.
To conclude the morning Annette showed us some slides of her trip to Greece many years ago.