Author Pam Grout
Book Review by Cathy Severson
Last year while visiting the gift store at the Joseph C. Campbell Folk School in the western mountains of North Carolina, I spotted The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life, By Pam Grout, published by National Geographic.
Aging baby boomers don’t necessarily just want to relax when they travel. They want a travel experience when they leave home. Here are a few examples of the new travel:
Adventure travel vacation that may include physical challenges or exotic locations.
Education travel combines learning with seeing the world. This would include experiential travel such as cooking classes in Tuscany, as well as more traditional learning like lectures on a cruise ship.
Voluntourism is a new term describing travels where doing good it the primary focus.
Midlife Odyssey is travel combined with spiritual or personal growth.
Grout has zeroed in to these travel desires by offering interesting and varied destinations that will enhance your vacation experience. The chapters are divided into four categories; arts and crafts, volunteer vacations, brain retreats and wellness escapes. Most of the vacations suggestions are within the United States, but there are some international travel destinations.
With over one hundred suggestions, Grout provides more possibilities than anyone could experience in a single lifetime. Even if you can’t go on more than one or two of her trip suggestions, she provides enough information with web addresses to travel vicariously from your armchair.
Retirement Life Matters has profiled a number of vacations highlighted in The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life.
We have traveled the world with Warren Stortroen as he volunteered on more than 70 Earthwatch expeditions.
Follow your passion for writing at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival or for cooking at the New Orleans Cooking School.
If you’re interested in something more physical, build a home with Habitat for Humanity, garden at Organic Farms in Hawaii or help Heifer International end world hunger.
If you want more of a vacation than sitting on a beach getting a tan and reading a tawdry novel then The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life is a must have for your bookshelf.