Hello World Travelers,
I trust many of you have had a memorable 2025 so far, with lots of interesting travel & adventure under your belts.
Happy to report that our final meeting of 2025 is coming up: Saturday, Nov. 29, at noon EST at the Hive offices, 950 Dupont St. Suite 300 in downtown Toronto.
Again, for those members who reside outside the southern Ontario region, we will be offering a virtual meeting option with a Zoom call scheduled for a 12:30 p.m. start.
I look forward to receiving your RSVPs. Please let me know if you would like to attend in person or via Zoom. I will send out a link for the meeting as we get closer to the day.
I am delighted to report that Dr. Phil Tanner will be joining us again with another unique perspective on world travel.
Many of you will recall Dr. Phil’s incredible presentation a couple years ago when he chronicled his experience growing up as a son of a United Nations Director living in countless countries (on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon 1975), then his career as a humanitarian aid worker (first boots on the ground on conflict/disaster-affected areas like Somalia, East Timor, Rwanda and Afghanistan, to name a few).
This time Dr. Phil will speak about something we are all interested in: Borders.
Borders: Lines and Boundaries that Impact Lives and Shape Travel
Dr. Phil will present historical and current geopolitical perspectives around the types of borders that exist — often established by events like war, culture, language, tribal realities, colonial influence, and other historical precedents. He will focus on how these factors impact countries and peoples. He will illustrate his talk with his own border experiences going back to the 1970s when he traveled along the Durand border line between Pakistan and Afghanistan with his dad.
For those of you who don’t know, Dr. Phil is also an accomplished singer. Check out this YouTube video where he spontaneously closed the 2024 TCC Azores global meeting with a ‘goodbye song’ that brought the house down.
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite travel quotes:
“Travel: it leaves you speechless then turns you into a storyteller.”
— Ibn Battuta a 14th century traveller
Look forward to seeing everyone in December.
Rick Shaver
TCC Canada Chapter Coordinator
