Following the Dream (Part 1)

Many of you know me through the various social media outlets that I participate in while others know me from the old days where we connected while I was on a totally different career path. Some of you know me simply by what you read here on this blog. But I am not sure many really know or understand how I got here and really what I do on a day to day basis for a living.

This series of posts will give all of you more of a glimpse into who I am and how I ended up here; here as in writing and talking about travel related stories.

It seems sometimes that destiny has a path for all of us, but it is up to us to be flexible enough and sometimes brave enough to jump on that path and remain there so destiny can come to fruition. My destiny started very early on. Growing up in the State of California, I was privy to learning about different cultures and people at a very early age. My best friends in grade school were from all heritages and backgrounds; Spanish, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Taiwanese etc. That early immersion started to give root to the desire to learn and see more of what was outside the mid-sized city that I was growing up in.

I can remember way back to the times that I would be driven over to the San Francisco International Airport with my parents to pick up friends and family. I would sit there in that airport and watch large jumbo jets take off and vanish out of site over the coastal mountain range that separated the airport from the Pacific Ocean; I would sit there and daydream about the far off land that the plane might be headed to. Were they going to Japan? Maybe they were headed to Australia or China. I would sit and watch and it seemed like time just stood still.

That curiosity never waned as I got older. I would still get in that airport even as a teen and young adult and walk over to the international terminal just to see the guests arriving from various foreign countries and just wonder who they were and where they were from and why were they here? I knew that someday I would be the one arriving through customs and it was just a matter of time.

Well..fast forward. I did travel domestically through my college years and on into my corporate careers after graduation. Since college and life took me away from my home state of California, I found myself being a tour guide for those friends of mine wanting to travel from the midwest out to the west coast. I found that I had a knack for arranging different aspects of trips for friends and co-workers so much so that many co-workers would come to me first for flight and hotel suggestions before they would eventually call our corporate travel agent to officially book their trip. The light bulb started to go off a bit when I found out that I was basically doing the travel agent’s job and all he/she was doing was taking the order. But I was not yet open to where destiny was trying to take me even though most of my co-workers jokingly would say...”you should be the travel agent for our company.”

The destiny bulb was starting to flicker, but not fully lighting up as of yet... (to be continued)