Greetings from Georgian Bay!
I hope you had a wonderful August long weekend - I had the pleasure of spending mine in northern Georgian Bay, which has been delightfully cool after a few days in the muggy Toronto heat.
The sweater weather up here has also been a not-so-subtle reminder that we're just a few short weeks from the fall, when the pace of everything kicks up a notch, particularly in the world of travel.
After a few months of no W&A trips, we've got a bunch of groups heading out to a bunch of places, and it's also a month when we historically see a surge in bookings as the cooling temps get everyone thinking about moving again.
And much as it may be a bit of a faux pas to speak of winter plans right after a long weekend in August, September tends to be when many people remember what comes shortly after the fall and there's a particularly big rush to make plans for that.
The travel industry is still surging and thus I think it's prudent to give everyone a heads up on all of this should you want to get ahead of the pack and get your plans sorted before the full madness ensues.
We tend to get most people signing up for our winter LiveAways in September, so here's a heads up a month in advance should you desire to join us on one or more of those programs this coming winter.
For our new members, our LiveAway programs are designed to be longer stays in one or two bases from which we head out and explore on excursions that happen every day or every other day. It's meant to be a different pace of 'wheeling and anchoring' than our Experience-style trips (ex. Morocco); definitely more in the 'slow travel' mode of things and very much suited to relaxing away from winter.
They were originally designed to be month-long stays in one place, which you can still do, but we've since introduced a more 'modular' set up where you can combine 2-week stays in different destinations if a month in one place feels like too much for you.
Roughly you could say our LiveAways fall into two categories, tropical and temperate. For tropical options in 2024, you could join us for a few weeks in Koh Samui (Thailand), Bali, and/or all the way out in the Indian Ocean to the remarkable islands of Mauritius & Réunion.
Alternatively, you could join us for Madeira, Malta, Cyprus and/or Sicily, all pleasantly sunny and warm, but not as steaming hot as the tropics.
In all of our LiveAways we have a wide range of excursions and activities you can choose to partake in, or you can just relax and do your own thing and still have people to hang out with, go for dinner etc.
Should you be interested in any of these, you can find links to the full itineraries for all of them via our Trip List PDF, and you can reach out to Barb or Paula should you have any questions.
So that's that, a month's advance notice if you haven't made plans for the winter 🙂
Looking much further ahead, I'm pleased to release two trips for Fall 2024, our Yachting the Turkish Mediterranean program and another departure for a spectacular adventure through Morocco.
Both of these filled up quite quickly for 2023, particularly Morocco, which has been in such high demand that we've had to scramble to try and put together more departures!
I'm not sure if it's the riads we're staying in, the luxury desert camping experience, or that it happens to just be the right place at the right time for people...something about Morocco has struck a chord and it has been a particularly popular destination amongst our community.
Our Turkish yachting program is another unique itinerary, where we spend a week travelling overland from Istanbul down to Bodrum, taking in sites like the marvellous Ephesus before setting sail for a week on a luxury gulet on the crystal-blue waters of a part of the Mediterranean most Canadians haven't cruised.
Türkiye will happen in September 2024, and the Morocco below is our second trip there in November 2024...do take a look at either or both should you be interested in joining us.
I think that's enough future thinking for this beautiful August day...I trust you're making the most of the present summer moments, and do get in touch should you have any questions, comments or feedback regarding these or any of our upcoming adventures.
Cheers!
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