AXW Travels

One of the advantages of working for a global company is the opportunity to travel to offices in other locations… and tack on personal travel to those trips. I was planning a trip to the London office in February 2017. I’ve never been anywhere with tons of snow in the winter so I decided to tack on a trip to northern Finland to see the northern lights!

In 2004, I was getting more adventurous and confident about traveling by myself. I decided to take my first solo trip to a country where English was not the first language, but hopefully enough people spoke English. Tapping into my success with REI, I booked a trip to Greece to do some hiking in the Greek Islands. To extend my vacation a bit, I added a few days in Amsterdam before starting the hiking trip.

After my success in traveling to England on my own in 1999, I decided to do it again in 2000. This time, my mom came with me. The trip started a bit rough. We were flying from Seattle to London via Washington Dulles. The trick was that we would catch a train in London up to Scotland for the first few days of our trip. But that, of course, depended on getting to London in time.

In 1999, I guess I was starting a tradition of a big annual trip. Where was my next one to be? I was still in my early days of traveling internationally, so I wanted to travel to someplace safe and easily navigate. England! They even speak the same language!