Tour Guide, theoretically

As I've often stated, I'm a big believer in recreating yourself every five years or so, otherwise we have a tendency to get bored with ourselves; and we me it usually just means bad behavior.  It seems that this five year window has become Gary Scudder, Tour Guide, in that I'm leading a lot of student trips.  Two springs ago it was Cyndi Brandenburg and I leading nine students to Jordan, which we threw together on the fly and with absolutely no promotion. Last spring Steve Wehmeyer and I took nineteen students to Zanzibar.  A month ago Mike Kelly, Kelly Thomas and I led twenty students to Spain and Portugal.  This coming March Cyndi and I are leading eighteen students to India and Sri Lanka.  I've recently put in proposals for two trips for next year: a return to Zanzibar with Steve in the form of a December trip that combines my Aesthetic Expression in the fall with his Sacred & Secular in the spring; and then Cyndi and I are leading a return trip to Jordan for March 2018.  Currently I'm also working on proposals for two trips for the following year: another linked December trip, once again with my main travelling companion Cyndi, to India and the Maldives (linking her Ethics and the Environment and my Heroines & Heroes); and then a March 2019 trip to Namibia, with, potentially, Cyndi, but I've started a competition with my friends wherein if they are waiting for me when I get off the plane in Windhoek in May then they get to accompany me on the Namibia trip (could be Cyndi or Steve or Kathy Seiler or Mike Kelly or even Mike Lange, who doesn't want to lead a student trip but has threatened to meet me at the airport just to throw a monkey wrench into the system).  That brings me up to the fall of 2019, which will either be another Thanksgiving trip, maybe back to Jordan (I can see the poster now: Thanksgiving in the Wadi Rum) again or a return trip to Spain and Portugal - or another linked December trip, maybe back to Zanzibar, or Samarkand, or, if it ever settled down, Yemen, but who knows?  And then, I'm done, at least that is my intention.  In January 2020 I turn sixty, and I've set that as the line in the sand when I stop leading student trips.  That would mean that I would have led nine different student trips, each to a different country or with a different theme, which is somewhere between cool and amazing and idiotic.  Now, why do I not want to lead trips after I turn sixty?  Part of it relates to the fact that at a certain point the students will, quite rightly, stop wanting to spend time with me, especially on a foreign trip.  And maybe, just maybe, I'll want to stop spending time with them.  It may also be that at that point I'll be more interested in just travelling on my own, and I'll really pick some challenging locations.  Having said all that, none of my friends are buying the January 2020 deadline anyway.  As we know, I will not age gracefully, so either the deadline will hold because in my mind I need something more, or it won't hold because someone will have made a comment that I'm too old to attract students on a trip or, for that matter, to lead a trip, and my ego will kick in and I'll be leading trips until I'm seventy (but not past January 2030, and I mean it!).

Morgan, one of the students on the Spain/Portugal trip, decided to act as if her were my arranged chauffeur. I guess it's still better than the guy who met me in Zagreb, Croatia (I think) with the sign that said "Straebag".