Hello!
We are Claire and Loren, from San Jose, California. We are excited to share our blog site!
A little about us –
Loren was born and raised in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. He had several meaningful travel adventures, especially in young adulthood, before meeting Claire in 1989. He told her then that he wanted to make more extended travels in the future. He worked in sales as a Manufacturer’s Representative in the Kitchen and Bath industry, until closing his business in December, 2013. In all he worked 17 years in his own rep business, after 15 years of prior direct manufacturer rep work. He calls this time in his life now “T&R” – meaning “Transition and Renewal,” believing that the word retired invokes a sense of being tired. So he prefers using T&R than to say that he is re-tired.
Claire was born and raised an hour north-northeast of New York City. She enjoyed vacations in North America with family and friends in her youth, thereby developing a love for travel. She moved to California on Valentine’s Day when she was 31, then met Loren that same October. She had always dreamed of traveling to Greece if ever she went to Europe, and for their honeymoon, Loren helped fulfill her wish by spending two full weeks in Greece together. She made a career change after 23 years in the computer industry to become a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, then closed her practice of 7 years to start this Journey. She imagines this to be a temporary, sabbatical time.
A little about our Blog –
We are keeping this blog for those family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances, and fellow travelers who would like to keep in touch or to check in to see what we have been up to on our Journey. With gratitude to a friend for ensuring that we had this site up and running before we left home, our blog had to be recreated after his domain was hacked in late 2017. What we could not repost are the 300+ comments that were shared on our original blog. Thank you dear ones for those connections! We hope you enjoy our new, continuing travel Journal, and will look forward to reading more of your comments.
You can specifically read about any of the places where we have traveled thus far by selecting from among the Categories under Where in the World Have We Been? on the bottom right side of any of our site’s pages. The list includes all seven continents – Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, and South America; the countries on those continents, and, the Canadian provinces and the USA states, that we have visited.
We are proud to claim the photos on this site as our own. You might notice that Claire continues to post on this blog every week, while Loren initially posted in spurts, when he was so inclined. From November, 2015 to June 2018, he composed “On The Road…” poetic reflections of our travels with his favorite photos, again when so moved, and which he emailed to his contacts. For now, these e-blasts, as he called them, are on hold, as we are on extended stay at an AirBnB in California near his Mom to help with her care. Please let us know if you would like to receive his e-blasts in the future, and are not yet on our email list. We always welcome your comments and connection. Below is our updated calling card with our current phone numbers, mailing address, and email addresses.
Thank you for visiting! Feel free to come back again, we always enjoy keeping in touch,
Claire & Loren
Journey Toward Wholeness 