Christmas Gifts to my Parents

I don't know what it is about life these days, but it is busy, busy, busy.  And so my writing on this blog has fallen by the way side.  But I am quickly going to share with you some of the gifts I gave away this Christmas.  Starting with this one.

My parents (and in turn my siblings) have been fortunate enough to be able to take us to many, many exciting places.  Starting when we were teenagers, we traveled all over Europe in a motor home.  Than we learned to scuba dive as a family and went to Belize.  We continued to communist countries such as Vietnam and out of the way countries like Syria.  We have hiked in Nepal and sailed in Tonga.  And many more countries in between.  It has even continued as we have all started to have children (like our trip to Holland with all the grandchildren).  Like I said VERY FORTUNATE!

So, I decided to give my dad and mom a t-shirt that captured all the great places we have visited.  I thought it would be fun to create a "WORLD TOUR" t-shirt of all of our family trips.  I designed it like  concert t-shirt with tour dates and cities.

Here is the t-shirt that I gave my parents.

SOME SIDE NOTES:  The inside joke with our family is that when my mom and dad would talk about going on a trip, they would have to clarify if it was a "BIG WE" (as in the entire family) or a "small we" trip (just my mom and dad).  So, for most of our lives trips were divided into these two categories.   Hence, the name of the TOUR.

On the back of the shirt it has the dates and cities of all the places we have been as a family growing up.  The last section of the shirt says "extended dates" and it includes those cities and dates we have taken with our family, our significant others and the grandchildren.

You might wonder what the "24" symbolizes.  It is the image that appears on a tiny runway in the middle of the himalayans in a little town called Lukla.   We had to land and take off on it to get to our hiking destination.  And to this day, we still talk about how scary of a landing and take-off it was.  Let's just say my dad who was a pilot at the time, had to shut his eyes and say a prayer for all our safety!

The front says underneath the wording "1989 - to infinity and beyond".  1989 is the year we started our world travels and our family has a funny pose that we do that means "to infinity and beyond" and since we believe we will be a family forever our travels will never end.  (I love that part of the shirt :-)