20th Year Anniversary of Craft World Tours

CRAFT WORLD TOURS 20th YEAR

love of travel & people, joy, sadness, & incredible experiences…

With this newsletter Sherry & I will be celebrating our 20th year of business as CRAFT WORLD TOURS! After running photographic trips through Rochester Institute of Technology for 13 years, we decided in 1983 to focus on handcraft & folkart tours. I had been on sabbatical for a quarter from RIT to research and collect posters from Yugoslavia. In my travels throughout Yugoslavia (at that time 6 republics and 2 autonomous provinces) I was impressed with the variety of handcrafts & folkarts. With my background in woodworking and Sherry’s background in textiles, we wanted to share the world from our perspective… Yugoslavia was our beginning. We didn’t even have a company name at that point, the trip was called “Yugoslavia Craft Tour”. We limited the trip to 24 people and to our surprise (and this rarely happens in the tour business), we filled the trip almost immediately. Upon our return, we immediately reduced our group sizes to 18. We were so thrilled with the success of the trip, that we decided to run more trips to Eastern Europe. After 2 years of working through a local travel agency, the agency (unexpectedly to us) went bankrupt taking with them our trip earnings. Undaunted, we then chose CRAFT WORLD TOURS as our name, incorporated the business, and decided that independence was the safest and securest route, so we now run the business from our home-office.

From 1984-88, I was still teaching so we squeezed our early trips into summer months and semester breaks from RIT. When I took early retirement from teaching in 1989, we expanded our trips over the entire year. We appreciated Earlene Laidley’s insightful comment that I did not retire, but rather just changed the age of my students. Initially we specialized in Eastern Europe… Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the former Czechoslovakia, Poland, and many states from the former Soviet Union including the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania… as well as the Caucasus countries of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The year of Chernobyl we realized the importance of diversifying our destinations, so over the years we began to include Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Myanmar, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. We tried a handful of trips to Western Europe, some like Portugal were very successful, but most did not sell at all. Our strength has been in the lesser-known and lesser-traveled places…

Tom & Sherry in the Bolivian Andes

Hardships & sadness… Chernobyl… the Gulf War… September 11… the invasion of Iraq… how much of the world views the U.S. now. Fortunately with our visits with people in their homes & villages, the people-to-people contact reinforces the good in human nature and transcends governments.

Joy and incredible experiences… endless. The appreciation on the faces of the craftspeople & villagers when we return year after year… going back is an invaluable gift. Watching a young Romanian girl from Sibiel Village mature from 9 years of age to a young woman in her mid-twenties. Catching the sparkle in her eyes of the late naive painter Florica Puja as she recognized an appreciative audience in our travelers when she shared her “treasure room” full of ethnic clothing & textiles. What began as a means of supporting our love of travel has become a labor of love, an incredibly wonderful way of life.

Sherry & I enter our 20th year as CRAFT WORLD TOURS with a deep commitment & love of what we are doing. Our traveling companions & the many people around the world we have met over the years have truly become an extended family! We thank all of you for making this possible!!!

(Signed)

Tom & Sherry