In “The Innocents Abroad,” Mark Twain wrote:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness… Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Sometimes it’s not easy to fight inertia. Departing from that cozy corner of the world where you have done your best to surround yourself with creature comforts and beautiful objects, to face the scrutiny of TSA agents, the challenge of overhead bins, the cherished memories of airplane legroom that disappeared somewhere in a Boeing engineer’s sketchbook years back, well, it takes some doing. 

However, at our Rotary Club of Highlands Ranch noon meeting on this past Thursday, we heard from some of the (not so) few, the proud, the brave, the adventurous, the ones who dusted off their passports and made their way to cowboy country in Calgary, Alberta, Canada for the Rotary International Convention: 

Once there, next year's District Governor, Bill Simmermon, John and Adrienne Logan, Debby Doig and Bob Martin, Shrin and Leika Murthy, Reen Gottron, Terre and Arthur Cone, Alan and Lori Balfour, Nancy Barton, Guy and Claudia Caves, past District Governors Mary Kay Hasz and Tamie Fennell (who traveled with husband and new member Kurt), joined fifty thousand other Rotarians representing one-hundred and forty countries. When they returned they shared their experiences with us.

We learned that Tamie got to carry a flag in the grand opening ceremony! At a breakout session, former international president, Gordon McInally once again made his plea for asking the “how are you…really?”question. This is a lesson that our club is addressing in an ongoing fashion with our own  members, as well as with “future Rotarians” in our communities. A common highlight stressed by the group was attending “host dinners” where they got to meet and chat with local Calgarians as well as conversing with Rotarians from Addis Ababa to New Zealand.

To echo Mark Twain’s sentiment quoted at the top of this page, our travelers returned with charitable views and expanded minds. 

 For decades, beauty pageant winners have been mocked for stating their wish for world peace. Why? Because it's perceived as a cliche? Our travelers returned from the International Rotary Convention having made contacts that improve the possibilities for achieving this goal, and in the process are doing their best to make that cliche answer the first question in the four-way test: is it the truth? 

Phil Clarke