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Home At First Destinations

Our World of Custom, Independent, International Travel

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• 1-Week Full Packages    • Ground Arrangements Only    • Lodging Only

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CUSTOM EUROPEAN TRIP PLANNING 

Do you have a unique travel goal for Europe? Home At First researches and custom-plans individual itineraries to your specific dream destinations, with all the lodgings, flights, and ground transportation needed to accomplish your goals.

WE CUSTOM-PLAN DREAM TRIPS TO:

• England • Scotland • Wales • Ireland • Isle of Man

• Austria • France • Germany • Greece • Italy

• Netherlands • Portugal • Spain • Switzerland
• Iceland • Denmark • Finland • Norway • Sweden

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A Letter from Home…

How Travel Became My Thing.

          The year 2025 is my 45^th in professional travel. Since 1980, I’ve seen a few things, done a few things, and learned a few things.
 
          When I was young, I never knew travel was a thing, as in a lifestyle, an avocation, or even a career. Not like being a cowboy, astronaut, baseball player, fireman, scientist, or even a politician. (Back then, being a politician, especially a Congressman, a Senator, or the President, was still considered an honorable job that was admired by children and most adults.)
          My family traveled a little. Like most Philadelphians we knew, we took family vacations almost annually at the Jersey Shore. Twice we went to Cape Cod and stopped briefly once to see Plymouth Rock where we believed the Pilgrims came ashore in 1620 to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These vacation trips were essentially fun frolics to the Atlantic beaches. We ate lots of junk food normally prohibited at home, stayed up well past our bedtimes, and never quite got all the sand from between our toes and elsewhere.
          Once toward the end of Eisenhower’s second term, we accompanied my father south on a business trip through Maryland into Virginia. We stopped in Frederick, MD, to visit the Barbara Fritchie house where, according to New England abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, an elderly daughter of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in a fit of patriotic zeal waved the Stars & Stripes from a second-story window above the passing Confederate army and Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Fritchie’s daring act even then was known to be apocryphal, or at least confused with another lady in another place and a different Rebel general. And Whittier’s poem, it turns out, was what we used to call propaganda, or what many politically-charged Americans today blast as “fake news.”.
          I encountered more ghosts of the Civil War on this trip. Some of them were unexpectedly placid. Some were eye-opening. We saw pieces of several peaceful, green parks that had a century before been horrific battlefields but now appeared more like golf courses: Gettysburg, Antietam, and Bull Run/Manassas. We spent one night in the old battlefield town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in an antebellum hotel that featured red-coated, white-gloved black men and frilly-capped, aproned black women in roles we immediately saw as servile. The experience questioned my understanding of the outcome of the Civil War.
          It also taught me the difference between a vacation and travel. The beach frolics were vacations. But our trip south of the Mason-Dixon Line had been a journey of discovery, away from the familiar and comfortable. Driving through Maryland and Virginia was travel to a foreign land, complete with introductions to new traditions, different foods (if only sweet tea, grits, and fried tomatoes), and alternative histories. I learned, and what I learned wasn’t always comfortable, but it was the most important souvenir I had acquired up until that time. It broadened my outlook and prepared me for the next 60+ years of future in America. I learned that the South had lost the Civil War, but it has not capitulated in The War Between the States.

* * * * *

          A half-dozen years or more later, I traveled by airplane for the first time. My girlfriend and I (both of us 17 years old) flew stand-by from Philadelphia to Denver on a TWA Convair 880. From Denver we took a Greyhound up US40 across the 11,307’ high Berthoud Pass to reach her family ranch just beyond Rocky Mountain National Park. No ocean, no beach, no sleeping late. For a few days I joined the crew to work the hayfields from sunrise to sunset. I got to know the ranch hands. I earned my breakfasts of steak and eggs. I learned that grass was money worth sometimes more than the beef cattle that ate it. I learned that dogs were work animals and not permitted indoors. I learned that land was dear, but water was dearer.

          Most importantly, I learned that a hard-day’s honest work was always a gamble and that fenceless, independent ranchers were at the mercy of the markets and the weather just like farmers, sailors, investors, and speculators everywhere. Once again, travel provided me a new perspective. I discovered I enjoyed the hard work of ranching, and I respected and admired ranchers, who were far more intrepid than footloose cowboys. And, after all those summer vacations at the shore, this trip to Colorado convinced me that alpine country was worth more than one short visit. My girlfriend had given me this opportunity. She was and is an inveterate traveler. She has taken me along on many adventures for almost sixty years.

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How a Vacation Differs from Travel.

          My 45 years in professional travel have taught me that the difference between a vacation and travel is the difference between fantasy and reality, the difference between playtime and life. What a vacation provides in relaxation, travel provides in experiences.

          My life’s work has been to help people realize their dreams, whether they are fantasies or realities or a combination of both. I have enjoyed seeing our clients delighted by living out their vacation fantasies. I have especially enjoyed seeing our clients broaden and mature from their travels that introduced them to new places, cultures, and perspectives. I am a firm believer that the best travel souvenirs are new ideas that help improve life at home while promoting understanding around the world.

          The lifelong story about how I got here involves many more twists and turns than my early trips to the South and the West. Perhaps I’ll share some of this history with you in a future essay in this space. 

Importantly, vacationing successfully and/or traveling well — and affordably — begins with a phone call (800-523-5842 US & Canada) or email (info@homeatfirst.com) to Home At First.

— Ron Fahnestock, Editor

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