Globetrotters Writers Spotlight — Jerry Dwyer
I read about a place and then travel there and bring my camera along
Hi Globetrotters. My name is…
Jerry Dwyer
I love to travel because…
I’ll just quote my Medum profile: “I read books and then travel to see places I read about. And I bring my camera with me.”
My number one travel activity is…
taking pictures. I bought my first film camera in 1971 and my first digital camera in 2002.
After we return home from a trip, I will spend several days and sometimes weeks processing my photos. For ten years I then spent up to six months writing about our trip on my WordPress blog. I then would start planning for our next trip. I expect that most of my future travel stories will be on Medium.
I come from…
I was born in Oakland, on the east side of San Francisco Bay. But I was raised in San Francisco. Then I moved back to the East Bay. And my wife and I have lived in Castro Valley for the last 49 years. This is where we raised our two daughters. They still live nearby with their own families.
I work as a…
Work? What’s that? I retired from Kaiser Permanente in 1997 after 35 years in IT. Then I went back to work for a year from November 1998 to November 1999 at John Muir Health. I was a Y2K project manager for that one-year stint. Remember all of the catastrophes that occurred on January 1, 2000, all over the world? Right, there weren’t any! Anyway, I haven’t worked since 1999.
The best place I’ve been is…
There are several places that are in a tie for best place. But I will just mention the place we have been that is number one on our bucket list for a return trip someday. And that place is Florence, Italy which we visited for four days back in 2009.
We had a great time in Florence, but we ran out of time to see everything we wanted to see. We went on an all-day bus trip to San Gimignano and Siena during our stay in Florence and on another day, we went on a winery tour that took the better part of that day. So, we only spent two of our four days actually in Florence. I remember our hotel was in an ideal location in central Florence, just a couple of blocks from the Duomo and a couple more from Piazza della Signoria, our favorite piazza in all of Italy. One more block would take us to the Arno River and our choice of bridges. We usually took the Ponte Vecchio.
In my spare time, I like to…
read; post-process my travel photos; watch Giants baseball games; read about our next trip. Our Covid lockdown in California began on March 13, 2020. Since then, I have had a lot of spare time. So, I spent the year 2021 writing my memoirs.
My top travel tip is…
Learn the word for Thank-you in the country you are visiting.
If I could live somewhere else, I’d live in…
Guam (my wife’s birthplace) for six months (October-March) and then Ireland (where most of my ancestors come from) for six more (April-September).
My favorite way to travel is…
by automobile. We did mostly road trips all over the western states and Canadian provinces during the last three decades of the last century. And we went on a memorable 4-week road trip all over Ireland in 2002. A 6-day road trip north and west of Madrid was a highlight of our trip to Spain in 2010.
Those were the only two trips overseas during the last 20 years where we rented cars, however. We usually fly to our destination and then rely on public transportation and our own legs and feet to get around.
We have been driving on our vacations for 50 years. For thirty years I did most of the driving. For the last twenty years my wife has been behind the steering wheel, and I have been assigned navigator duties. Even those duties are coming to an end, though. We bought a new SUV a couple of years ago that comes with Apple CarPlay. Now all Bennette has to do is plug her iPhone in and GPS takes over. And I can sit back and enjoy the scenery!
Three lessons I’ve learned from traveling are…
- You will get more out of a trip if your destination has a particular, personal meaning to you. In my case, I often combined my genealogical interests with our travel plans. I have been able to look up cousins in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and to visit places in France and Germany where my ancestors lived.
- if you are headed for Europe, take a Rick Steves guidebook with you.
- A river cruise with 100 passengers is a lot different than an ocean cruise with 3,000. Our Rhine River cruise in 2012 is one of our favorite trips ever. We started in Switzerland, and by the time we arrived in Amsterdam seven days later we knew everyone on board. And every day that week we woke up at a different port.
My wife Bennette has been my constant companion on all of my travels. We traveled with our kids until 1987 when they informed us that they didn’t want to travel anymore.
So, for the next 28 years my wife and I traveled on our own. Then in 2015 we took our older daughter and her family to Guam and in 2018 we did likewise with our younger daughter and her family. In 2019 we gathered all ten of us — two daughters, two sons-in-law, four grandkids and ourselves — and flew to Ireland for three weeks. In 2017 we traveled to Spain, Portugal and New York and two of my sisters tagged along. We’re back to family traveling!
