Following the Dream (Conclusion)

So there I sat in the office of my local travel agent hearing options for various vacation ideas before finally settling on the idea of taking our first Caribbean cruise. We were excited. We had never been on a cruise before and the more I researched the ship and its itinerary, the more I watched the clock hoping time would go by quicker and quicker.

But something else was happening as we planned for this trip. The light bulb of destiny started to shine a little brighter. It was becoming clear again that I was doing most of the research. I may not have mentioned this, but one of the reasons I also chose to get into real estate was that we had a bad experience when we bought our first home and we were not informed or educated about the process of home buying by our Realtor. The Realtor we used back so many years ago was more interested in getting her commission than she was helping us through the process. I sensed that and I knew that I could be different and make sure clients never had to feel the way we felt. Well...the same sort of thing was happening with our first experience with a travel agent. She got the booking and we were left feeling somewhat on our own. I had to initiate all contact even though she knew quite well that we had never taken a cruise before in our life. I knew things could be different.

Then an event happened that I will never forget as long as I live. One sunny summer day, a friend and myself were enjoying a visit. He and I were discussing our jobs versus our career dreams. We both had good jobs, myself still in real estate and he was an insurance claims processor. We were making good livings but we both realized that they were simply jobs to us now. They were not what we dreamed of doing. So he simply asked me the question..."what is your dream career?" Without hesitation I said..."travel agent." I had never said that out loud before. But then I said what I had always felt..."but I don't think I could make a living at it." Well...to make a long story short, he questioned me on why I felt that way and talked about my travels and where I was raised and my experiences helping others with their trip plans and he could tell that there was some passion in my voice. I also listened to myself and how I was answering. I never said nor would I say today that I got into the travel business because I like to go on vacation just like I never said that I got into real estate because "I like looking at new homes" which some new real estate agents unfortunately had vocalized.

Traveling and the desire to learn about people and cultures and the desire to help people achieve their vacation goals all combined in my answer to why I had always wanted to get into the travel field. So that day, that afternoon even, I went home and started a search into what it would take to get involved in the travel industry. I researched...I studied...I trained...and here I am today. Now I am at the point that clients trust my experiences and knowledge which in turn makes me referable to their friends and family. I continue to achieve the necessary certifications that distinguish me from those who simply like to go on vacation and then tell others that they are "travel professionals." I am following the dream that I had so many years ago. I now feel that I am on my path and my career is no longer just another job. I feel it was what I was meant to do all these years, but had been afraid to try. I am now on my path and my wife and I travel as frequently as we can so I can continue to gain first hand knowledge of various destinations and experiences which better equips me to serve my clients.

So I am thankful for that friend who challenged my thinking and encouraged me to follow my dream and I encourage all of you to do the same.

Following the Dream (Part 4)

As I stated in my previous post...sometimes life throws you a curve ball just to see if you are paying attention. My wife and I have learned that tomorrow really is not a given. Her battle with cancer was a wake up call. Here we were and here I was on a path that I thought I would be on for years to come. But only during those difficult months did we realize that we had not been truly living. We were in “career mode.” We were becoming successful at our careers, but losing sight of what made life truly enjoyable. Up until that point, I had only thought of travel as a business necessity. My wife had tried and tried to get me to agree to go on a true vacation, but I had always balked and used work as an excuse. I decided we would finally take a trip, but even that trip was built around a real estate training event which meant that it really was not a vacation.

Well...after her chemo was completed...I broke down and agreed that we needed a getaway. Life had been pummeling us for a while and you can feel when you are nearing some form of breaking point so we made it official and I booked us a trip out west to the sleepy seaside town of La Jolla. My real estate career took a very positive turn a few months before this trip and I had made it a point that no career was more important than quality time with someone you love so I agreed to not check voice mail and I would not be checking e-mails during this getaway.

It was as if a HUGE lightbulb finally went off in my head. Here I was living in the moment or in the “present” as Spencer Johnson so eloquently wrote about. I was seeing everything more clearly. We were truly vacating during that trip. Everything slowed down and things were perfect. So there I now sat on the plane coming home skimming magazines and trying to find our next vacation destination. It was now in my blood, but in a different way. I was hooked on real travel, the kind where you are open to experiences and places that are different from your normal way of life. The kind of travel that you are excited about months before the trip actually gets here.

So one of the first things I did when I got home was go to see a local travel agent for help with a much more exotic location and little did I know that I would be taking my first step upon my new path... (to be continued)

Following the Dream (Part 3)

So if you have read parts 1 and 2, you are probably trying to now make the connection between going into real estate and following my destiny into the realm of travel. Life is like a big puzzle and the full picture never really appears until more and more pieces are connected. So follow along now as I reveal more of my puzzle.

I decided on real estate because I felt I was a good fit. I had a marketing and sales background coming out of college. I studied buyer behavior as well as developed skills in customer service throughout my corporate career. I also knew real estate would provide a great chance for me to learn the ropes of entrepreneurship and self-employment. I knew that, to succeed as a business owner, you had to commit 100% of your time which is why I knew I needed to quit my full-time corporate job and jump all the way into the pool...so to speak.

So fast forward again with me...I am now in real estate. I have a good client base being built up. I am focusing on service which is also making me referable. Things are going well, so well that my wife and I start to plan a future as a mom and dad. Without going into a long history...we were childless due to medical complications associated with a brain tumor that my wife had survived right before we got married. We always knew that someday we may consider adoption so my new career was also going to be a good fit with being an adoptive parent since I could be home each day. So we started the process that one must go through to adopt through private agencies. Life was just moving along down the path that we thought we were going to be staying on for a while.

But then it happens. Life throws you a curve just to see how you can handle change and adversity. No one can really prepare you to hear those words spoken to the one you love. But there my wife and I were in the Dr’s office as he was letting my wife know in the most gentle way he knew how...she had cancer. (to be continued)

Following the Dream (Part 2)

As I continued down my road (not knowing or seeing yet how it would all someday be part of destiny), I found myself one day accepting a position at a company in rural Tennessee. Little did I realize that this job would mark the beginning step into my career in travel. Also little did I know that this new job would soon send me to the very place I dreamt about as a child...Japan. My first view out of the window of that jumbo jet was the rice fields and tiled roofs of the houses and farms surrounding Tokyo’s international airport. It made me acutely aware that I was now a foreigner in a strange Country and I had become the traveler I had wondered about so often as a child.

Those many trips overseas taught me a great deal about people, culture and life, but I was also learning the intricacies of how to travel abroad.

It is funny how the pieces of life seem to all start coming together. While I had begun to stress over the amount of time I was spending away from home, away from my wife during all of my business related trips, I was slowly looking inward to find out what I truly wanted to do and what gave me true fulfillment when it came to my career and work.

I knew I wanted to be in control of my own destiny. I learned that working hard in the corporate world did nothing to truly give you true peace and security. So I had made my decision to seek some form of self-employment where I felt more in control and where I could work while still spending more time at home.

So off I jumped...pulled my chute and trusted I would succeed in the world of...real estate. (to be continued)

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)

What is Behind Door #1?

If you are like me when you travel, you always have wondered what is going on behind the scenes at various places. We all want to know what is going on behind the scenes after we wave goodbye to our luggage at the airline check-in counter; sometimes we regret we didn’t spend a more quiet intimate moment with those bags during that goodbye as we later discovered it would be the last time we would ever spend time together. So naturally our minds try to guess at the mysteries that take place in the area where us mere mortals are strictly forbidden. It is like trying to sneak a peak at Oz.

Well...that same wondering takes place every time I step foot on a cruise ship. I have often wanted to see and hear of the goings on behind those doors that plainly read, “crew members only.” How is it that a cruise ship can feed thousands of patrons every night with such speed and accuracy? How can thousands of beds and staterooms get tidied up while we are gone for what only seems like a few minutes? It is like something out of an “I Dream of Genie” episode. We know that what makes a cruise a real vacation is the attention to detail by the crew and the royalty treatment that we all receive that helps us all escape some of the stresses of everyday life for just a while.

But I am afraid that many have forgotten that it is the back-breaking work of each crew member that makes a cruise one of the best vacation options available. We lose site of that because we never get to see what is going on behind those closed and forbidden doors, that is until now.

Warning...sometimes reality can alter perceptions. You can now get an idea of what it is like to be an employee on these floating cities that we call cruise ships when you pick up a copy of “Cruise Confidential,” written by Brian Bruns. I just picked up a copy of this book the other day and I am losing sleep because I cannot put it down. I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive at first. I was not sure if I was ready to see the truth of what really goes on “below deck,” as I will refer to it. Was I ready to know how the employees are actually treated? Was I prepared to learn of the hours that each crew member is required to work during each cruise? Did I even fully understand how each crew member is compensated and did I really need to understand that?

The book is a must-read in my opinion for anyone who has made cruise vacations their primary means of getting away from it all or even for any future cruiser. It is brutally honest, not only of what life is like working on a cruise ship, but also honest of how cruise vacationers are perceived by the crew, especially Americans. Now before you discount what is said of the American tourist, please know that the book is written by an American crew member. He let’s us all see how many are viewed when it comes to our consumption of food, or should I say the over-consumption. The book has helped me understand the everyday struggles that a crew member must work through, but also helps me see that we (the passengers) can make their struggles much greater by the way some act and treat them as if they are their indentured servants.

As Brian states in the book, each food service employee is required to work all day, breakfast, lunch and dinner with virtually no breaks in between. The tips we all give them at the end of the cruise is the majority of their income. So don’t think for a minute that you are over-tipping someone with the standard $10 per person per day recommendation. And don’t think, as some do, that just because you only ate in the buffet each night somehow relieves you of having to tip any of the dining help. Each person you see, the person getting you water or tea at the buffet, the person clearing your plate after you ate lunch by the pool, the person keeping the buffet lines full of plates, every person there relies on your tips as their main source of income and they are working VERY hard to earn those tips (80+ hours a week on average).

The book also gives you some insight into the mass of international humanity that is below deck. Every crew member, with the exception of the rare American like Brian, is from some other Country and speaks at least 2 if not 3-5 languages. They all have to know and speak English when they are “above deck” where the passengers are. The book will help you see how we all should be patient with the crew since they are having to switch between their own native tongue and English just for us. And for those who have the idea that they should speak English because they are in “our Country,” uh...they are not actually. Just because the ship has its home port in the U.S. does not make it a U.S. territory. It sails you and me to FOREIGN Countries where we are the minority along with the crew members so just chuck that line of reasoning right out the window and be respectful. We are all a part of the human race are we not?

In summary...the book did a great job in helping me understand more of how it all works behind the scenes. Knowing how it works may alter some of my decisions as far as how I order in the dining room and how much extra I may tip those that went above and beyond to make sure I had a great time. The book will help me be more patient with any crew member in any situation where I may think something is not going as I had planned or expected.

So I encourage you to pick up Brian’s book and realize that knowing the truth of what does happen behind the forbidden doors can help us all have a better overall vacation experience.

Princess Cruise 2010--A Summary

You know you either had a great vacation or a really bad vacation when you find yourself sitting and reflecting on all the different things you did on your trip days and even weeks after the vacation is over. Well…I have already stated that our vacation with Princess Cruise Lines was a GREAT vacation and I still find myself pondering all of the great things we were able to experience. Some of the things I have continued to think about even include more of the “pros” that the Emerald Princess has to offer and Princess Cruise Lines in general.

My previous two posts did not mention some of them that I feel should be pointed out before I leave the subject entirely. In fact, I can’t believe I had forgot to mention this one in Part 1. Those of you who have cruised before with other cruise lines know that, in most cases, you cannot access your stateroom on the day of embarkation until sometime after 1:30 or 2:00PM. That means that, if you board the ship before that time, you have to carry some of your carry-on luggage with you as you go to the “welcome aboard” buffet or as you tour the ship. It can be quite a burden if you were one of those who probably packed too much in your carry-on. With Princess we were able to get into our stateroom as soon as we boarded which was just a little past 12:00PM. This may seem small to some of you who have never cruised before, but trust me, it is a big deal for those of us who have waited in some cases until 2:30PM before we were allowed into our staterooms. So again…thumbs up Princess.

The last pro I will mention is another one that I am mad at myself for overlooking in the previous posts. Again, for those of you who have at least one cruise under your belt, most likely you were directed to a check-in line at the cruise terminal where you either waited in the general boarding line or you were lucky enough to be in one of the “frequent cruiser” or suite passenger line. I am a fan of how Princess breaks the lines up into deck categories. So, for example if you are on the Plaza Deck, you only have to go wait in the line designated for that deck. That makes it easier for the personnel as well since the stateroom keys are already broken down by deck and placed near that line. I know…you are probably thinking that I am really getting too detailed, but trust me, those little things can make the whole process go much smoother and can get your vacation off to a great start.

So with all of this said…I will leave you with a video showing the pictures and visuals of why I say that our vacation was one of the best ones we have had so far. Please leave comments, questions, opinions etc.