Editors note: This article has been edited for clarity.

By Luca Pignatiello,

Journal intern.

This year is the thirty-fifth season Skagit Valley College has hosted Road Scholars in San Juan Island.

“We are incredibly proud of the partnership,” Randy Martin, director of the Skagit Valley College San Juan Center said. Road Scholars was created to inspire educational travel and adventuring through exploring the wild and unimaginable. The program reaches over one-hundred countries, from Southern Europe to Japan to Middle Africa. The Road Scholars are a tour company that, since 1975, has been managed as a non-profit organization focused on educating the older population on parts of the world they haven’t explored yet.

Previously named Elderhostel, Road Scholars was created as a safe place to learn, discover and travel. The name of the organization changed, as Laurie Lairson told me, she had been doing the program throughout the name change, and said that none of the admirable qualities and values changed since then. Lairson said she had been on “forty-one trips so far, and this one [the Two Island Trek: Great Coastal Hikes in the San Juans] will make it forty-two”. Another person in the program, Norman Lacourcicre, has been with the organization for just as long, and out of all the trips he has been on and participated in, he says that “Marble Canyon, in Arizona, is [his] favorite”, a hiking trip that takes the trekkers off-trail and into the canyons of red rock and sediment. Lairson’s favorite trip was the adventure in Tucson, Arizona, at the White Stallion Ranch, it is her “happy place to get away” as she has gone on the trip numerous times.

The program features different types of adventures, from hiking to a cruise to sightseeing to sports trips and exploring the environment. The Road Scholars offer over five-thousand trips in one-hundred-fifty countries around the globe. The diversity of the adventures and the expanse they cover inspire the participants to really take part in new things, whether it be in a cultural, physical or thoughtful way.

Road Scholars has been a staple in many people’s lives, giving them experience and fascinating adventures, and opportunities, like Mike Vouri, a current instructor. Vouri involvement with Road Scholars began long before he was actually hired by the program. As a park ranger in the San Juans, Vouri would give talks to their visiting groups who would trek the island’s trails. In April of 2016 Vouri decided to retire as a park ranger. Not long after, he was offered a job at Road Scholars, letting him continue his passion for teaching the community about the history and place we live in, saying that “I don’t even think about being seventy-five when I’m leading these people”.

With its thirty-fifth partnership anniversary approaching, this program has created a network of welcoming people and places with the objective of teaching and inspiring others. Throughout the years, many people have come into the program, and it has only grown, adding more learning opportunities for people all around the world, and generating an adventurous and welcoming environment for everyone.