Welcome to the Suite for those with adventure in their blood and a bad taste for sheep's.
In one of Graham Green's books, two best friends - a priest whom got his higher title almost by mistake and a mayor of a smaller village with communism as faith - drive together on a mountain road. Suddenly their journey are blocked by a large flock of sheep crossing the road. This event bring the mayor to confess that he many times had been close to the Christian faith and shared many of its ideals. But there was one topic in the holy book that made it impossible for him to change ideology, and this was the fact that humanity was compared with sheep's (-expressions like "lamb of God", the saviour shepherd searching for the lost lamb, and so forth).
I have the same problem with much of the "traditional" mass travel industry, as there often is a tendency to treat the travelers as sheep's. We call them "pax" not persons or guests, there is a love for volume whatever reason or means, and programs presented are often only surpassed by the photocopy producer Xerox.
Mind You, there are many good travel agents and tour operators out there - and many a traveler who are able to choose. And this is a bottom line - there IS a choice, lets take it, lets share it, and remember that we are not black sheep's - rather the Goats of the travel family.
Why Goats? Let me tell You an experience I had earlier in my life, when some friends during the "back to nature wave" had bought a farm together. Soon we learned that the sheep's where a danger to the continues existence of all the vegetables we so dearly had planted from seeds and where our only income. We put up a fence of fencing wire that was recommended by the highest authorities, as it was smaller holes below (the small sheep's You know), and we even buried the bottom part of the fence in the ground.
It worked perfect for the sheep's, but then one early morning I witnessed something I hardly would have believed if I had not seen it myself. Over a small hill came around twenty goats strolling along, cutting small bushes here and there along the way (when they cared for it) each in a own phase and mood. But when they came to our fence, they gathered and stopped up, this was something new and demanded a meeting. After the meeting was over, two goats put their heads down & horns into the smaller holes I just mentioned. Their strength was more than the fence and they lifted it up and made an entrance which a single goat could crawl under. So done, one by one they crawled under, and it was not long time before they where among all the chemical free delicious food - a breakfast made for primordial creatures. I gave them a rather long buffet before I went and got them out...
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