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Gutsy trips for women on the wild side
Sandy Carlyon has searched for tigers “elephantback,” jumped into the ocean and swam with dolphins, explored caves in New Zealand, carried camping gear up to 14,000 feet in Bhutan, bumped along in a 4x4 in Botswana and flown over Victoria Falls in a two-seater plane.
“It’s about as close as you can get to being a bird,” says the 67-year-old of the latter experience. A resident of Purlear, N.C., Carlyon has traveled six times with AdventureWomen, a Bozeman, Mont.-based tour company celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Owner Susan Eckert — whose trips have included conversations [as opposed to “table talk”] with cannibals in New Guinea — specifically established her business for women in their 50s, which she considered an unserved market in the travel industry. In fact, you must be older than 30 to take one of her trips.
“The average age of the women [taking AdventureWomen trips] is about 55, and they don’t necessarily want to come with people who are their kid’s age,” she explains.
See our slideshow of Top Adventures for Alpha Females.
“I have yet to be the oldest on any of their trips, says client Camilla Nielsen of Chicago, who, at 69, has traveled across the Sahara and in Kenya on camel.
“I believe in doing things I wouldn’t do myself,” says Nielsen, whose husband gave her an AdventureWomen trip to northern India for her 50th birthday. “I never thought of myself as an adventurous woman,” she says. “When my husband gave me the gift, it was kind of like opening Pandora’s box.” She has since been on more than 16 AW trips. The scariest moments she recalls were walking across a suspension bridge in Nepal and negotiating a section of a cliffside trail in New Zealand that was so narrow she had to turn sideways. It was so unnerving, Nielsen says, that she briefly considered turning around and walking solo the day-and-a-half distance back to their starting point.
Janet Ridgway of Claremont, Calif., has taken six trips with Adventures in Good Company, a women’s tour company headquartered in Baltimore. At 56, she climbed California’s highest summit: Mt. Whitney at 14,494 feet. She has since hiked in the Grand Canyon, canoed in Minnesota, backpacked the Appalachian Trail, climbed Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Grand Tetons in Wyoming and hiked Patagonia in Argentina and Chile.
“I like to expose myself to activities and environments different from daily living patterns,” Ridgway says. “AGC attracts extremely nice traveling companions — well educated, physically fit, curious, stimulating individuals with whom it is enjoyable to spend time while broadening one’s horizons.”
Comparatively a baby at 49, Patty Gabris, a flight dispatcher for United Airlines in Chicago, has completed eight trips with Adventures in Good Company since 2002.
“There’s been a difficult area in the trips where I am exceeding my confidence zone,” Gabris says. She travels with her husband, but he does not like to hike, so she enjoys the company of other adventurous women hiking hut to hut in British Columbia or making the 7.5-day climb up and 1.5-day descent down Kilimanjaro.
Gabris theorizes that the reason most of her traveling companions are well past their twentysomethings is because older women with established careers have the time and money required for exotic travel.
See our slideshow of Top Adventures for Alpha Females.
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