For years as a teacher, I planned and executed many a student field trip.  The work was often burdensome but in the end, totally worth it.  All throughout my career, I went on adult field trips.  Sure, they masked themselves as national conferences with a great group of friends but in the end, they were recreational as well as professional.  Now retirement … should I still be attending conferences?  I wasn’t sure but I’d had two other experiences that inspired and fulfilled my wanderlust.  One was a trip to Hawaii to take a comparative volcanoes class and the other to Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and safari on the Serengheti.  What would I do now that I was retired?  There were after all graduate school linked trips and the professor had also retired.  Then I remembered an experience that I had through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant I received to learn more about the Ancestral Puebloan culture and teach this to my Colorado fourth graders.  The organization conducting the grant is called the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.  On a whim, I visited their website and discovered that they have trips for adults.  What happened for me was extraordinary and the best trip of my life.

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