As part of the Vision 2000 Travel group I have access to a variety of long stay holidays for helping you escape the winter blahs. There are long duration holidays in Portugal, Italy and France. All very affordable and escorted for comfort and peace of mind. There will be an information presentation about these holidays on Sept 20^th, at the St. Catharines club. Please click here to read more about these special offers and contact me if you wish to attend this session.

 Once again, my good colleague Jim Cooper and his wife Lindsay, will be escorting another “trip of a lifetime”. This time it will be a Blue Danube river cruise and tour with a stay in Budapest prior and Prague afterwards. This tour departs on May 25^th, 2006 and we have an extraordinary early booking bonus of $700.00 off per couple if booked by Sept 28^th, 2005. We will be having several information sessions on Sept 14^th, so click here for more details about that.

 For those of you who have always wanted an affordable tour “Down Under”, we have a wonderful escorted trip to New Zealand and Australia in November of 2006. This exclusive tour with Collette Vacations is 21 days long and includes most meals along with an optional trip to the Fiji Islands.  We will be holding an information session on Oct 25^th, 2005, so click here for more details.

 The Vision 2000 Travel office at the Grantham Plaza is on the move at the end of the year. For me it is a bit of a homecoming as their new office will now be located at the corner of Queen and Church streets in downtown St. Catharines – exactly one block from the former Flarity Travel office. Many of you will be familiar with the old Queen Street Baptist church. The manse, next to the church, has been purchased by Gord Vaughan and his Vision partners. It is now being extensively renovated and will be ready for business sometime in December. I will have an office there for those of you who wish to meet with me personally along with my current home office location. Click here to get a look at this beautiful property as it is being restored.

 I must share with you a very special moment in my travel business career. For the past 18 years I have been arranging travel for Roy and Betty McCurley of Toronto. They were referred to me by one of you, as have a number of other out of town clients. The McCurleys have been on many wonderful vacations along with the usual travel for business and occasional family emergencies.  Unfortunately, until recently, we had never met face to face. We had always communicated by telephone and more recently email. Nonetheless this never stifled our conversations about children, business, and our solving of the worlds problems. They were friends as well as clients and I always looked forward to planning their next adventure. Roy and Betty have purchased a retirement property in Niagara on the Lake and I recently had the pleasure of sharing part of an afternoon with them. It was a treat to finally put a face to familiar voices. Hopefully, we will able to see them more often after they settle into Niagara full time. Click here to see our first meeting and cheers until next time.

Darcy.