Tripping with Parents

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John: He's getting older, and I'm storing up memories.

Allan: Walking along Bourbon Street, I stopped at the Court of Two Sisters and pointed: "John," I said, "around the corner is the hotel where your mother and I first stayed. We could order drinks right through our window." I enjoy telling him about his mother. She was a very special person.

?VISIT THE ANCESTRAL HOMELAND

Diane Dobry, 49, grew up hearing legends of her great-grandfather, a Hungarian nobleman reduced to managing a baroness's stable. Later, as an instructor of media studies at Queens College in New York City, Diane visited Hungary several times to do research and wanted to share the experience with her mother. So she surprised her mom Carol Hornbuckle with a trip to Budapest as a 70th-birthday present. Diane found them a pretty four-star hotel, the K+K Opera in Budapest, introduced her mother to her Hungarian friends and took her to places of historic interest like Esztergom Cathedral on the Danube and the Museum of Ethnography. At the museum, Carol spent hours entranced by the 19th century embroidered clothes and hand-painted furniture like her grandparents'. The trip not only strengthened their bonds to the past but also to each other.

Diane: She got teary. It was a feeling beyond satisfying to help her connect with something so meaningful to her.

Carol: That Diane would do this for me--with all she has to do with her boys and school and the house--makes me realize how special I am to her. The trip brought us closer, and I think of it every day.

?SHARE A PASSION

Angela Hult of Portland, Ore., cherishes girlhood memories of peacefully trolling on Puget Sound, while her father would bait her hook and tell her stories of his boyhood. Now 38 and a community-relations director, Hult spotted an opportunity to share that kind of time with him again. At 70, her dad Jim Hajek was lamenting that his old fishing pals were gone or infirm and that his back pain kept him from making the rugged trips he used to enjoy. He leaped at Angela's offer to fish together at the Salmon Falls Resort in Ketchikan, Alaska. She picked a lodge that provided guided trips on comfortable boats, packed lunches and cleaned their catch each day. They caught lots of fish, saw pods of orca whales and watched a school of Dall's porpoises. Angela had worried that father and daughter, both stubborn, might "butt heads," but she found it easy to defer to him.

Angela: It helped us recapture what we had when I was a little girl and I could see the delight in his eyes.

Jim: Kids take off in different directions when they leave the nest. I felt honored that my daughter would go fishing with me.

?FULFILL A DREAM