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Features


Oh, the places they’ve been

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Published:

Story by Heather Gascoigne

For some people, the word vacation brings to mind lounging pool-side sipping tropical drinks with little umbrellas in them.

Not so for a group of four women from southeastern Wisconsin. For these women, vacation means white-water rafting or elevations of 16,000 feet, visiting ancient ruins all over the world, hiking through jungles and sleeping in the open air in the desert.

The women — Cheryl Buckley, Elaine Dishaw, Mary McNello and Nancy May Staacke — have been vacationing together for almost 20 years. Buckley and Dishaw took a wilderness survival class together in 1989 that culminated in a trip to Taos, N.M., and the surrounding Pecos Wilderness to test out their skills.

The first day started out with beautiful weather, Dishaw said, but then the rain started, which made the full backpack each member of the class was carrying even heavier. Hiking 8 to 10 miles in the rain to find a suitable campsite made Buckley question her judgment.

“I looked at Elaine like ‘Who the hell’s idea was this?’,” Buckley, said with a laugh during an interview at her home in Mount Pleasant. “That was a horrible day and night and the next day, but for the rest of the trip it was warm during the day. But we went 72 miles and there was this euphoria for having accomplished the trip.”

But Dishaw said that trip was the beginning of 20 years of wonderful adventures.

“We thought now that we have learned how to do it, we’ll do it on our own,” Dishaw said. And they have. The group grew to include McNello and Staacke and has been going strong ever since. The list of places the women have visited is impressive and includes Alaska, the Salmon River in Idaho, the Grand Canyon, Belize, Egypt, Bolivia (where the women hiked at 16,000 feet, their highest hike), Vietnam and Thailand, Morocco (where they slept in sleeping bags on the desert sand) and Borneo. In October, the group added Nepal to their list. In May they plan to go to Syria and Jordan, where they again plan to sleep out in the desert.

A trip to Glacier National Park in Montana in 1992 was the first trip to include all four of the women. Each of the women is married, but they all say their husbands aren’t interested in this type of vacation.

“My husband will hike all day,” Buckley said, “but at the end of the day, he wants a hot bath and a hot meal. We always go to place where our husbands don’t want to go.”

McNello said the first year she went on a trip with the women was in 1993 to the Canyonlands and Dark Canyon, Utah.

“I didn’t think we were going to go that far but the llamas couldn’t keep up with us,” McNello said with a laugh.

The women try to make each experience a new one. Things like taking their first hot-air balloon ride in Egypt over the Valley of the Kings is one thing, but the stories that get the women talking and laughing are the unintended experiences.

McNello said her biggest memories of the trips are of the “things that go goofy.”

In 2005, the women hiked in the mountains around Sapa, Vietnam, about 250 miles northwest of Saigon. The women heard from locals about a popular market, Buckley said.

“It had rained for days before that, but our guide was determined,” she said. “We got to a crossing and it was rained out, but the driver talked to these five guys on, essentially, mopeds and they took us there.”

McNello interrupted, “I lucked out, I got the drunk one,” she said.

“We got there but Mary thought she was going to die,” Buckley said.

“There were all these terraced rice paddies and water buffaloes, it was beautiful, and we’re zipping along on these mopeds,” Dishaw said.

“I just saw loose stones and anything that the wheel could get stuck on and Mary could go flying,” McNello said, referring to herself and laughing.

Things that “go goofy” seem to stick in Staacke’s mind, as well. “In Borneo, I had a leech take hold and draw blood for quite a while when we were hiking on the elephant trails. That was interesting,” she said.

The women have found a group that works for them: Dishaw is the nature lover of the group, always looking at animals or the vegetation; McNello is the self-proclaimed “cautious one” Staacke is the mountain goat, always willing to climb and Buckley is the social butterfly. Dishaw said Buckley always “gets to know the guide really well.”

Staacke says McNello’s biggest role is as “the funny one.”

“She has a wonderful sense of humor,” Staacke said. “Mary keeps us laughing. She’s really fun to be around and that’s important when the four of us are together in different situations for two and a half weeks at a time.”

The trips have steadily moved toward more sight-seeing than hiking as the women have gotten older, Dishaw said.

“I have learned that if the guides estimate eight hours for a hike,” McNello said, “we have to add two hours because we’re slow or we’re stopping to take pictures.”

Some of the adventure vacation firms the women have taken trips with weren’t expecting the travel veterans.

“In Borneo (2008), it was all young people and then the four older women,” Buckley said. “But in the end the young people had a lot of respect for us. They were faster, but we all made it to the same place. They said to us, ‘We hope we’re still traveling when we’re your age.’ ”

A long list of adventures

Pecos Wilderness, N.M.

(Buckley and Dishaw with class)

Weminuche Wilderness, Colo.

Glacier, Mont.

Canyonlands and

Dark Canyon, Utah

Middle Fork

Salmon River, Idaho

Alaska, Yukon Territories

Montreal, Lake Placid, N.Y.,

Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec

Grand Canyon

British Columbia, Alberta,

Mount Assiniboine

Belize and Guatemala

Peru

Egypt

Nicaragua

Yosemite National Park

Bolivia

Vietnam, Cambodia

and Thailand

Vancouver and Bella Coola,

British Columbia, Canada

Morocco

Borneo

Turkey

Nepal

Syria and Jordan

(planned for May)