Fom a recent trip (2024) to NYC. This was a two day stop off the Oceania Vista. Our trip this time will be six nights in a hotel in Times Square

We are back to traveling! YEAH!!! In less than two weeks, Kathleen and I will get up really early (4:00 am) and meet 26 other Trilogy residents at our clubhouse for a ride to SeaTac Airport, where we will all board Alaska Air flight 34 nonstop to the Big Apple.

I know this sounds very different from our usual trips. For one thing, we don’t usually travel with 41 people, but we will this time. If you are a regular reader, you know that we live in a 55+ community called Trilogy on Redmond Ridge in Washington State. Our community has an active Travel Club, and I happen to be its president. One of the things the Travel Club does is offer quarterly trips for members. In the 20+ years the Trilogy Travel Club has existed, it has traveled to every continent except Antarctica, visited more than 50 countries, and traveled all over the US.

I joined almost as soon as we moved four years ago and was asked to join the board and take over as Vice President and Communications Director in my first year. I became president the second year and have been ever since. I tell you all this because, in that time, there have been more than 12 Travel Club trips, and we have been on exactly NONE OF THEM!

So we decided we needed to join one, and along came a theater tour to New York City. Two of our members participated in a theater tour sponsored by a local theater group and LOVED it. They thought it would make a great trip to offer to the club. So we contacted Alex at Break-Away Tours, who had led the theater tour they went on, and started setting this up.

To get a little deeper into why this trip will be special for the Club,I need to let you know that up until the pandemic, the Club trips had a very high rate of participation. Usually, the Club’s trips and tours would have 20-30 members (out of our total of 450 members) traveling on them. Since the pandemic, it has been hard to get back to those numbers. Our norm right now is somewhere around eight people. Sometimes as few as four. We have started working with tour companies who don’t have minimums for tours because they will do a tour with 16 people and combine our eight with four from somewhere else and four more from another place. It’s great but not what used to happen.

On this theater tour, we (the Travel Club Board) decided to roll the dice and do a private tour with a minimum number of people required, or the tour would not go. Break-Away only does private tours, so we had to have at least 20 going. To be honest, when we rolled out the trip, I wasn’t sure it would go. Getting 21 people to want to travel that far and spend that much was a distant memory in our Club’s history.

But lo and behold, three days after we put the trip on sale, we were sold out with 41 people headed to Broadway. In fact, up until our final payment date on Valentine’s Day, we had a waiting list of 8 more people who, sadly, won’t be joining us.

So that’s why, a week from Thursday, Kathleen and I will get up early, board a “luxury motor coach” I have arranged, and take off on a Broadway adventure. We will be in NYC for 7 days/6 nights, leaving on April 30 and returning home on May 6.

The trip itself looks to be amazing. We have tickets for three Broadway musicals and one straight play, lots of different tours, six nights at the Westin Times Square (where we can walk to every theater in less than 10 minutes) and a bunch more that I will detail between now and when we leave.

Needless to say, we have never done a tour like this. Most people we have ever traveled with were on our Martini Mates reunion cruise to Alaska in 2017, when we had 17 people on Celebrity’s Solstice. This will definitely be an adventure, and I will be detailing it all here on our blog. If you want to follow along, make sure to sign up to be notified when I post.

Broadway is a main artery of New York life – the hardened artery.   —Walter Winchell