Retirees Latch Onto Chances To See The World South Hill Senior Center Books Trips With Its Own Agency

Plenty of seniors on the South Side aren’t crocheting.

They’re kayaking.

They’re hiking, camping and wandering the wide world - from the cobalt-blue lakes of Idaho to the rolling emerald slopes of Ireland.

“We’re a hip, happening group,” says retiree Joyce Cutler, 63.

So many folks are finding adventure past 50 that the South Hill Senior Center has its own travel agency. And when it added a full-time travel director in April, business went bonkers.

In July, 215 seniors took trips through the center. That’s two or three times more than years before.

The center’s director, Myrna Johnson-Ross, attributes the wanderlust to having a full-time staffer devoted just to organizing tours. And that’s certainly a big factor.

But according to the travelers themselves, there’s something else.

“We’re all living longer and healthier,” says Cutler, who recently took a center-sponsored trip to British Columbia. “We’re kind of a new breed, not just the ‘sitting in the rocking chair’ group.”

No kidding. In July, she went to Vancouver Island, and from there to the Nuchatlitz island chain.

With kayaks atop the van, they drove the longest road to nowhere.

When they stopped, they camped in tents and cabins without water or power. Eagles nested overhead; otters splashed in the sea.

“They’re cute,” says Greg Kitley, the center’s travel director. “They all have their favorite rocks.

“They put them on their chest and try to crack the clams. They’re cool. They look like they’re having fun.”

He meant the otters. But the seniors had fun, too.

The trip wasn’t “passive,” Cutler says. It was real and a little rugged and made them feel like kids.

Once, a trip ended on an unexpected note. In November, a tour group was coming back from Canada’s Fairmont Hot Springs and got stuck in Bonners Ferry. The ice storm hit; the air was so white they couldn’t see the road. Semitrucks smashed into ditches.

The wayward seniors slept in a National Guard armory. After the cots were rolled out, a police chief told them, “We haven’t had to use these since Ruby Ridge.”

Did the travelers gripe? No way. They loved it, says a survivor.

“We were safe and warm and fed,” Jessie Quincy says.

Kitley is more pragmatic.

“We were a day late, is what we were,” he said.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Most trips aren’t like Sylvester Stallone movies.

In the next two months, seniors will cruise the St. Joe River, see scenic Montana in the fall, and head down to the Bay Area and San Diego.

Ocean-jumping jaunts include vacations to England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. They’ll also fly to New Zealand and Scandinavia.

Packages in the Northwest are often day trips and can cost as little as $15. Big getaways such as the one to the United Kingdom can cost $2,450.

Programs like the one at the South Hill center are important, Kitley says, because the population is aging. In the 60s and 70s, “it was the hippies. Everything was youth-oriented.”

And while today’s seniors can still go gray, modern medicine can help them keep from slowing down.

The man steering the center into travel was decades from slowing down when he started. It was 1973, and Kitley was a teenager.

He worked on a tour to Ketchikan, Alaska, and was hooked. Kitley and his brother started their own company in the mid-70s.

Now 43, he’s been a car salesman and a charter bus driver.

The senior center has offered trips since 1985, but without a big promotional push. Kitley began planning the tours in October, and it became his full-time job in April.

It paid off. The increase has been lucrative for the center, which is trying to raise money for a new building. Although director Johnson-Ross won’t say how much money the travel agency brings in, if the North Side’s Corbin Senior Center is any example, the take isn’t bad.

The Corbin center more or less blazed the tour trail. It’s been offering senior trips for 30 years.

The center has a $300,000 annual budget, only $20,000 of which comes from the city.

“The tours have been the center of our success,” Corbin Director Carolyn Bryan says. Corbin has had customers sign up from as far away as Georgia.

People from anywhere can go on both the Corbin and South Hill tours. Bryan says people like booking trips with senior centers because they won’t be alone.

They’re with people their age, from their neighborhoods.

“They move at the same speed,” Bryan says.

Which, for some seniors, is Mach 1.

“Just because we cross an age line doesn’t mean anything,” Cutter says. “People are up and doing.”

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