For her 60th birthday, George Cohan gave his wife, Natalie Holmes, the kind of present senior travelers nearing retirement often dream about: a trip around the world.
“I had an epiphany that such an adventure would be, for both of us, an appropriate reward for a lifetime of conscientious attention to duty,” George wrote in a 150-page journal describing the five-month journey. “Either that or a magnificent self-indulgence. Either way, noble or base, I was determined to do this while we could still enjoy it.”
George, 69, could take the time away from two companies he had founded, leaving word where clients and staff could reach him along the way. Natalie was to retire just before departure.
So in February 1992, nine months after George began his plans, the Chicago couple departed on an odyssey that included Natalie’s most memorable birthday, spent among the hill tribes of Thailand.
The trip had other purposes too. George and Natalie planned visits to family and friends around the globe. George arranged to meet business contacts and to scout Vietnam as a potential source of seafood for his fish importing company. In addition, he would return to places where he had served during World War II.
“Just the Magellanic sweep of the phrase-`Trip around the world’-is as much about attitude or aspiration as it is about geography,” George wrote. “And our attitude was, `Go for it!’ “
The trip’s price tag was $51,000, including $12,340 in business class airline tickets.
“Anyone can do such a trip for less than we did,” Natalie said, “just by buying cheaper airfare.”
For instance, Saga Holidays offers Around the World in 34 Days, starting at $7,699 a person, double occupancy, including airfare; or a 62-night Around the Globe: By Air and by Sea, starting at $11,999, including airfare and an Athens-to-Hong Kong cruise on the Royal Odyssey. Or a pricier trip: Travcoa’s 30-day around-the-world tour by first class private jet costs $85,800 a couple.
Delightful days were spent with family and friends. In Hawaii, George and Natalie hiked Kauai’s rugged Na Pali coast with his son, Charlie, a U.S. Army doctor, and granddaughter Kristina.
In Japan, their old friend and host, Itsuro Kawate, took them to a mountaintop Buddhist monastery. Kawate led them to a monument erected by his grandfather in a 1,000-year-old cemetery in a cedar grove.
In Egypt, there was a chance meeting with old friends aboard a flight to the temples at Abu Simbel. The two couples cruised down the Nile together to the immense temple of Karnak at Luxor, where they were thunderstruck by a sound and light show beneath a full moon.
In France, their hosts, Alix and Philippe, were old friends whose children had stayed with George and Natalie in Chicago. The family treated the Americans like honored relatives as hundreds of friends and family members gathered at their manor house on the Breton coast for the wedding of daughter Priscille.
Some of George’s business duties led the couple to equally rewarding adventures. In Vietnam they were joined by George’s son, Barry, fluent in Vietnamese, and six others in the fish business.
Natalie toured Saigon and made an excursion to the northern mountains while George’s group headed south to the Mekong Delta to survey shrimp farms and processing operations.
In Oman, where the manager of the country’s largest fishery treated them to dinner, they sailed in a dhow and dined on sticky dates and cardamom-flavored coffee with a Bedouin family.
At World War II sites, George experienced nostalgic moments.
“Natalie keeps telling everybody that I am revisiting my youth on this trip because we are visiting places I served,” he wrote of their visit to Pearl Harbor’s Arizona Memorial in Honolulu. “For just a moment today she was right-I was 17 again.”
Calcutta, where he had served, was “an assault to the senses,” George wrote. As he and Natalie made their way along a main street looking for his quarters of 46 years before, “scattered along the broken sidewalk and hunched up against the decrepit buildings are homeless people. We are running a gauntlet of poverty that is worse than degrading; it is absolutely dehumanizing.”
They flagged a taxi, which located the building in which George and other officers had lived during the war, then freshly painted and scrubbed, now crumbling.
“I stumble up the stairs, and a panoply of remembered faces spring to mind-names long forgotten come chasing after them,” George wrote. “I am peering down a long tunnel of time, past all the events that comprise my life and at the far end, for just a moment, I see a young, eager, rambunctious, laughing red-headed lieutenant en route to life’s adventure. Suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, I am racked with sobs.”
The other stops on their journey read like a grand tour of the world: Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bali, Nepal, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Holland and England.
“We have traveled through 23 countries on 19 different airlines, five boat trips, a hydrofoil, a funicular, several trains and three rented cars for a total distance of about 36,000 miles,” George wrote.
“Strangely enough, we never got tired of traveling. Perhaps even more amazing, we never got tired of each other’s company-never had an argument on the whole trip. We played approximately 1,600 games of gin rummy and I won by 26,299 points.”
