LHSDGT, anyone?

Randy Keck’s article on long-haul, single-destination group tours, or “LHSDGT” (Sept. ’04, pg. 106), really hit home with me. For 25 years, when working in the corporate world, I was lucky to be able to go away for a whole week. Now that I am retired, I want to travel for long periods (at least four to six weeks) and to faraway places.

I started my adventures by taking tours, but I discovered that most tours were for less than a month and each included so many places on their itineraries that often I had only one night or, at most, two nights in each place. Most of my trip was spent getting from place to place rather than being there. This is just not the way I want to travel, so now I have switched to creating my own itineraries with a knowledgeable tour company.

It would probably be less costly to travel in a prepackaged tour. For instance, Overseas Adventure Travel (Cambridge, MA; 800/955-1925 or www.oattravel.com) has a 17-day Southeast Asia trip (which is really only a 14-day trip because they count from the time that you leave the U.S. plus two overnights in Bangkok). They do limit the stops so that you have at least two days in each place, but that is just not enough for me to feel that I have been there.

If there are tour companies that do a relatively comprehensive tour of places with a limited amount of time in vans and buses, I would love to know about them.

NILI OLAY
New York, NY