Travel. It's personal.®

Adventure. It's personal...

A few days ago a banner ad popped up on my screen:  "Find Your Casino Adventure In Reno-Tahoe.” I wasn’t interested,  but was struck by the pairing of Casino with Adventure. You’ve got to be kidding!” I thought.  You can’t imagine my surprise when I discovered that in an early definition adventure meant chance, risk or jeopardy.  Well, what do you know? Casino and Adventure fit together after all. 

Adventure can be different things at different times and mean different things to different people. Any excursion  – even the most mundane – is at its core an adventure: a bold undertaking requiring courage to leave the comfort of home.  It’s clearly an adventure to climb Mount Everest or trek through the Andes to Machu Picchu.  An emerging sector called voluntourism lets us travel to distant lands and gives us opportunity to provide humanitarian aid or health care or build homes and infrastructure for those in need.  Family vacations, trips to camp, a cruise, a tour – all have an element of adventure.  And though not as obvious, even that trip to Las Vegas can be just the adventure we need sometimes.  The common element?  When travel engages us it’s an adventure. 

When we take a “travel adventure”, we enjoy extraordinary experiences often discovering something wonderful and exciting about our destination and ourselves.  If we seek “adventure travel”, that implies that we not only desire a remarkable experience, but that we anticipate the thrill and exhilaration that comes from the reward of taking the risk of unknown outcomes and surviving to tell the tales. 

Our travels mirror what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey.”  We leave our village, get help along the way, meet the challenges of a world outside our own and return to our village with the magical elixirs from our journey.  We share our adventures through pictures and souvenirs and tell our tales to any who will listen. These experiences enrich our lives and change us.

We still find that creating and taking travel adventures that engage us and fit us personally is still a challenge.  That is why MMC3 Adventure Capitalists, Inc. is launching a website called Entr’acte (pronounced “ontrakt”) Traveler. 

Entr’acte Traveler is your portal to stories to travel by.  We call these stories Travelore. Travelores are themed location-based stories that set the stage for engaging travel adventures. We integrate travel logistics, activities and attractions with Travelores.  By mixing and matching customizable travel modules it’s easy for you to plan and enjoy personalized travel adventures – not only for yourself but for your travel companions too.  On location, Travelores bring great places alive as you experience a fully personalized and integrated travel adventure called a redThread ADVENTURE.  

 

Travelers in Traveland

Flights, Hotels, and Prices... Oh My! Travel brokers always start by trying to get you the best price for getting to your destination and hotel. I want to start with “Why” I am going, and ‘What” is there for me when I get there. It’s as though the “Why” and the “What” have no value in the travel equation, and your destination only adds up if the commodity provider can make his/her commission.

As the name of our blog Travel. It’s personal. implies, I am on a quest to find personalized travel that fits the “Why” I am going, and “What” is there for me. I want the commodity brokers to know it’s the first time my family is going to Europe and that first impression is important to me. The cultures, the customs, the food, the people are the “Why and “What,” about which we want our big adventure to be. How does a flight to Paris, 3 nights in the 7th ward, a train to Florence, 4 nights there, picking up a car and driving to Rome with 5 nights in that city and returning to the States on the 6th day,  answer my “why and what?” These parts of travel are just parts. They do make a difference, but the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. I guess it would be easier if we took one of the hundreds of different prepackaged tours. Should I choose this alternative, I would be  sharing my personal family time for two weeks with fifty newly acquainted mates traveling on the coach with us.

I would know what I want if I knew what was out there, but I don’t have the time to dedicate four hours a night for six weeks on the internet to make a personalized and detailed itinerary. It's the time between the commodities that counts. It’s the “Why” we are going, and “What” is there that make the destination. Is any one out in Travel-land listening to the travelers?

What's In Our Name?

So what do we mean by: “Travel. It’s personal.”? 

We are passionate about travel and finding ways for all of us to create travel adventures that are experiential, immersive, special and unique.  Clearly, what is personal for you may not be personal for us.   To us when we say “personal” and “personalize”, it means “made especially for you” and “tailored to fit you”.  It is the opposite of “cookie cutter” and “one size fits all”. 

Marie enjoys travel adventures that blend historical drama and fantasy with real world locations.  Margaret loves to explore and appreciate the cultural connections of the people and the food of the places she visits.  In both examples a lot of time is spent on research and planning to find the stories that create these immersive experiences. 

For us making our travel experiences personal is an inclusive exercise.  At times we may indulge our own personal preferences to the exclusion of others, but more frequently making travel “personal” includes considering the personal preferences of our family and friends both directly (when we travel together) and indirectly when we ask for advice and input or by sharing our respective adventures, discoveries and fun times. This is what inspires our imagination in our quest to make travel personal.

We look forward to your comments and finding out what you think and what makes travel personal for you. 

All The World Is A Stage...

    Our career backgrounds and our love for travel became the catalyst that led us to formulate ideas for creating travel adventures through a "mashup" of entertainment and travel.  We knew we had something and we wanted to share it.  It's what set us in motion to start this blog and to create Travelore™, which literally means travel stories.  We use stories to set the stage for discovering the world.

    We believe that great stories create great travel adventures. When we hear the stories (the lore) of a place we visit, it comes to life.  Stories reveal the history, myths and folklore and connect us to the drama and the romance behind the traditions that influence each culture and define its people and its social structures – its economy, its government, its religions, its style, its art and architecture, its music, its food, its drink and its celebrations.   

    At the moment we are creating our first Travelore™ stories. Eventually we will produce these stories to be downloadable for playback on mobile media devices.  In the meantime we have decided to share the alpha (printable) version with you.

    Location-based storytelling that transports you through place and time...

    Look for our first Travelore™ stories in the coming weeks and months.

Who We Are & Why Travel

Marie Miller
Concept & Art Director/Environmental Designer

    Working for many years in entertainment, designing theme parks, museums, etc. allowed me to travel.  I always look for the back story to the places I visited.  I love to discover environments around the world.  Each location has its themes, stories and unique beauty.  The people, the culture, the architecture, and the history, the lore of how it became the place it is today, are the elements of travel that  make my experiences unforgettable.

Margaret Zola
Tour Director/Leisure Travel Product Manager

    As a tour director and product manager, I have been able to share my love for places and cultures with others.  Over the years I came to realized that flights, hotels, tour buses and rental cars don't usually make very exciting entries in our travel memory books.  What we treasure are our experiences with family and friends and the discoveries we make about ourselves and the places we visit.

Travel Threads...
    We got acquainted through Marie's sister, Cheri.  Coming from different worlds of employment, we found we share a common thread or as the German's say: "a red thread" that ran through our collective life's stories -- we love great travel adventures.