Interview with Mel Holzman and Jane Ryland

Names: Jane Ryland and Mel Holzman

Ages: 62, 70

When and where did you go on your first ExperiencePlus! tour? In 1988 we did the Bike Across Italy Tour from Venice to Pisa (the only other option you offered at that time was Bike Across Italy Backwards, Pisa to Venice!). A friend at work had done this trip the year before and told us how wonderful it was. We weren’t disappointed!

We know that Mel has participated in 20 of our tours, and Jane has done 17—what were your favorite countries or tours, and why? It’s so hard to pick favorites because we’ve loved them all. We’ve done Venice to Pisa once and Pisa to Venice twice (ten years apart) and we think it’s hard to top in terms of scenery, food and wine, cities/towns to visit, art/culture, and the wonderful people of Italy. Other favorites would have to include the Dolomites for scenery, Turkey for cultural experience, Provence for France at its best.

What motivates you to travel to far-off places? Probably a drive to experience diverse cultures, peoples, and customs, and to find that all of us around the world are part of a greater whole. But we also just enjoy the process of travel (except maybe when the airline loses our luggage!). Mel has two airplanes--a twin Cessna that has taken us as far as Alaska, Mexico, the Bahamas, and Nova Scotia--and an antique Piper J3 cub that we fly to small dirt airstrips in Oregon and Washington, sometimes going more slowly than the cars on the Interstate highway below us!

What does bicycle travel give you that other trips don’t? Seeing the world at a human-powered pace gives us a chance to really look at the places we visit, and encourages us to stop, meet, and talk with the people. Also, bicycle travel lets us stop more often for gelato and cappuccino! But we’d say that the most important reason is that it is an active holiday; we love to be physically active and bicycle travel accomplishes that perfectly.

What’s the most exciting adventure you’ve had while traveling? Perhaps when we were scuba diving in the Bahamas, going two at a time into a blue hole (sort of a cave cut into the limestone) in one of the shallow-water bights that cut across Andros Island. Mel and our divemaster were the last two to explore the blue hole, and as they emerged and began to climb back into our boat, a huge hammerhead shark, clearly excited by the scraps of food our chef had been throwing into the water as he prepared our lunch, heaved himself up over the reef and straight at the boat! A few minutes later, and they would have been lunch for the shark!

What is the most unique or meaningful souvenir you’ve ever brought home from an ExperiencePlus! tour or from another trip? I have a wonderful green straw garden hat with embroidered flowers that came from an ExperiencePlus! cap exchange. We had stopped in front of a beautiful chateau in the Dordogne and were admiring it when the owner pulled into the driveway. She graciously invited us in to tour her home, and at the end, I impulsively asked if she would be interested in etchanging something. She willingly went into her closet and came out with the garden hat – while I don’t wear it very often, I treasure the memories of her and her lovely chateau.

Describe the best meal you have had while traveling: Oh my gosh; what an impossible question! How to choose from so many memorable meals! Maybe it was the little family-run restaurant, a pretty good walk up to the top of the hill from our hotel in San Marino. It was truffle and porcini season, and the 7 of us ordered a variety of dishes, all with one or both succulent ingredients: risottos, pastas, you name it. In true Italian style, there was no pretense or formality; each dish appeared as it came out of the kitchen, at its peak of perfection, without regard to proper sequence or attempting to serve all guests at once, and in true Italian style, each of us dived in immediately. Conversation lagged, replaced by “oohs” and “aahs” as we tasted the fantastic dishes, washing them down with some lovely house wines. As we reluctantly scraped the last delicious scraps from our plates (restraining the impulse to just pick them up and lick!) the owner walked over with 7 glasses and a frosty bottle of limoncello. We groaned – but did the best we could, and soon managed to finish it off, looking up just in time to see the owner bringing back two more – much larger – bottles of limoncello. This time all powers of resistence had disappeared, and we had no problem finishing those bottles as well. The total bill? The equivalent of $10 apiece! We struggled to our feet and out the door, our friend Pat insisting there was no way she could walk back down to our hotel. She spotted a car with a light on top and went running over yelling, “Taxi! Taxi!” stopping short when we realized the light was sort of blue-ish and the words on the car now looked more like “Carabinieri” then “Taxi.” The driver laughed with us, but we still had to walk down the hill!

Any secrets to your longevity (either in bike tours or in marriage)? Probably a little patience and a sense of humor – realizing that things won’t always go smoothly, but waiting a bit and trying to laugh will greatly ease those rough spots!

Tell us something about yourself that most people don’t know. After more than 28 years together, we got married last year in a tiny church in the Manor Valley of Scotland’s borders country, with Jane’s sister Nancy, who is a minister in the Church of Scotland, officiating, and Mel’s sister, her husband, and their Golden Retriever, Fanny (who wore a new pink “necklace”) as the only guests.

What question do you wish we had asked, and how would you have answered? We know you often ask for a description of a perfect day outdoors. Ours would be to wake up in a charming little lodge in the Selkirk mountains of British Columbia to find that 8 inches of fresh snow had fallen overnight. After a hearty breakfast (including the Canadian favorite, hot Red River cereal) we dress warmly, pick up our Heli-Daddy skis, and head for the waiting helicopter, which whisks us up to a glacier top, kicking up a cloud of powder snow as it hovers on a narrow ledge high in the mountains. We carefully exit the helicopter, ducking low to avoid the still-turning rotors and edge over to the start of an endless expanse of untracked snow. Our guide looks over the terrain and then instructs us to wait until he has made about 20 turns and then we follow him one at a time, “adding to the right” so as to avoid the crevasse he’ll closely and safely skirt to the left. We’ve learned that “adding to the right” means to lay our tracks down as closely to the right of his tracks as possible with crossing them, so each skier gets perfect, untracked snow. We follow, each in turn, each of us making perhaps 150 turns without stopping, and at the bottom, we look up to see our 5 sets of tracks carved in the powder. We continue in similar fashion until we reach the bottom, where our waiting helicopter picks us up to repeat this heavenly skiing, with a mid-day break for a mountain top lunch complete with steaming bowls of hot soup. At the end of the perfect day outdoors, we return to the lodge and await a gourmet dinner, maybe first enjoying a soak in the hot tub or collapsing onto the massage table for a welcome revitalization of the aching muscles that inevitably accompany skiing 40,000 vertical feet in a single day.