Sew Many Places with Jim

As many of you who have traveled with us over the years, you know all of our tours sell out very quickly. We have quite a variety of tours and cruises lined up for next year and even into 2010. I would highly recommend, especially if it is a land tour, to secure your place with a deposit as soon as you know you want to go.

Already, we have nearly all of next years trips half sold. Contact Colleen or Julie in our office if you have any questions or would like a flyer sent to your home.

Thanks!

Hi everyone:

We only have 30 days left before we have to finalize our Batiking Tour in Bali. If any of you are interested in going, we have 12 spaces left before it’s sold out. Kaye England is our special guest, and I can assure you, it will be great fun, educational and completely worry free.

Please contact Julie in our office to place your deposit and secure your space.
Thanks!

Buongiorno quilters!

In just a couple weeks, we will be announcing our Tuscany, Italy tour for next year. We are really excited about a couple new options we have featured. First, we are making this tour a complete Tuscany tour, which means we are staying at the same DELUXE hotel the entire time we are on this tour.

Second, we will offer a four day tour package to Venice prior to the tour and a three day tour package to Rome after the tour. So you can pick and choose what package best suits your Italian desires.

If you would like to receive information about this tour before it is announced to the general public, please email me and I will put your name and email on the list to receive it a couple days before we let the general public have it. We are only taking 45 people on this tour, and as you probably know, our tours sell out quickly and our Tuscany tour is one of the most popular.

Grazie Mille!

I decided to add ten more spaces onto our Africa Safari and Fabric tour with Kaye England because the space we were holding sold out so quickly. I was able to get 10 more seats with the airline and at the hotels and lodges, so it’s a go.

I learned yesterday that 4 of those ten spaces were sold, so that leaves only 6 spaces remaining!!!!!! If your dream trip is to go to Africa with a bunch of fun and exciting people, this is the tour you don’t want to pass up! Give us a call on Monday before it sells out again.

By the way, I am not going to increase the number of participants any longer. I don’t want more than 35 on this tour. It is easier to manage and everyone gets more coddling!
Jim

There is no question in my mind that a trip to Italy, especially to the Tuscany region, activates a person’s senses to full overload. The spectacular rolling Tuscan hills, filled with bright red poppies swaying in tall vivid green grass had all of us snapping photos with every turn.

We ate and ate and ate homemade pasta’s, great pizzas, drank excellent (inexpensive) wines and tasted gelato until we couldn’t eat any more.

We heard relaxing Italian music played by local musicians as we leisurely walked from piazza to piazza.

And if one could only capture in words the aromas of the fresh country air, the Italian cuisine and the fragrance of the honeysuckle, it would make you dance.

We visited some of the most exciting places in the entire region: the history and art of Florence, the beautiful Piazza del Campo in Siena, the picturesque Cinque Terre, the medievil town of Lucca, and taking a cooking class from a charming Italian grandpa and a local family owned winery.

From Tuscany, we also had two full days in Rome, where we explored the city with complete abandonment. We even visited one of the most beautiful gardens in all of Europe, the Villa D’Este in the town of Tivoli. It was amazing to say the least.

Our group of 51 people consisted of mostly quilters who brought friends or family members. And all of them, (and I mean it) all of them were wonderful. It was a special group of people who bonded right from the beginning, and it couldn’t have been any more apparent then when we went to an Italian villa for dinner one evening and danced, ate and drank for hours.

Kaye England was with us, and if you know her, you know there were great laughs and lots of fun.

We’ll be posting our photos from the trip in the next week or so, so be sure you are watching for them. In the meantime, if you would like to travel to Tusacany with us next year, be sure you are on our waitlist to receive the information before it sells out again! We are offering an optional tour to Venice before the tour begins, and Rome will be an optional tour at the end.

I don’t know what it is, but the word rumor has such a curious ring to it, doesn’t it? There are some rumors floating around in the quilt industry regarding me and our company, and I wanted to update you on those and set the record straight as to whether they are True or False-

1. The Bali Tour is sold out. FALSE. We still have seven spaces left before it’s sold out and when we hit that mark, we begin a wait list.

2. We are combining our company with our sister company ScrapMap. FALSE. Sew Many Places and ScrapMap are both independent, subsidiary companies of Travel Alliance, Inc., one specializes in Quilting Tours and one is Scrapbooking Tours, and we are keeping them both separate.

3. Sew Many Places and the American Quilters Society are no longer planning trips together. TRUE. Both Meredith Schroeder (the owner of AQS) and I have decided not to continue planning tours for AQS. Because of the lack of participation on two of the three trips, they were cancelled. Cancelling trips is not something I like to do at Sew Many Places, and Meredith felt it was best to discontinue promoting them.

4. Sew Many Places is expanding our office and hiring travel agents around the world. TRUE. We are building our travel agent community around the U.S. and around the world, in addition to opening offices in Europe and Asia.

5. Kaye England and Jim West are dating. FALSE. Kaye and I are incredible friends and she is working with us on many cruises and tours. I would say she is one heck of a great gal, and our personalities do mesh beautifully. However, there is no chance of her and I dating or anything remotely close to that.

6. Sew Many Places is offering a rewards program for past guests. TRUE. The program actually begins this summer, and we will be offering discounts on future tours if you have traveled with us in the past. And yes, before you even ask it, we will honor any tours you have been on with us in the past, so you will reap the benefits of this program.

7. Jim West is 39 years old. COMPLETELY FALSE. Where this came from is really beyond me, unless it was started by a real Jack Benny fan. I am actually going to be 50 years old next year!!! AARP here I come!

8. Sew Many Places donates money to women’s causes. TRUE. We donate $25.00 of the commission we receive back to breast cancer organizations and also to ovarian cancer organizations. We also take the quilt blocks our cruise participants offer in our quilt block contests and have them made into pillows and blankets for children’s hospitals. My grandma always said, “You gotta give back!” and she was right!

9. Jim West was going to become a deacon in the church. TRUE. A few years ago, I began discernment to become a deacon in the church, but that eventually turned into me starting two travel companies. One is called On Holy Waters (for Protestants) and one is called Catholic Trips (for Catholics). I like the idea that with these companies I can still keep my faith strong and also travel, and at the same time, bring people closer to God through a travel experience. This is one of the reasons why I decided to organize (with Kaye England) a trip to the Holy Land in 2009. By the way, there are still about 15 spaces remaining on that tour if you want to go!

10. Sew Many Places makes money by being paid a commission. TRUE. There are some organizations who add money onto the cost of their trips, sometimes up to $1000 per person if you can believe it, but this is NOT something we do. As a travel agency, we get paid a commission from the cruise and tour company we work with, so you can be sure there is no money added onto the cost.