Éclat Travel's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘France’

Spice up your next vacation by including attendance at, or participation in a special event. The more unique the better.

Machu Picchu

One of the most memorable trips I took was for a very unusual kind of a race in Ravenna, Italy. I wasn’t racing, but I was chaperoning the person who was, Rachael Scdoris.  Rachael is a professional sleddog racer from Bend, Oregon. Hers is an amazing story. I was fortunate to meet and get to work with Rachael and her dad Jerry, while I helped to coordinate a world championship sleddog race in Oregon, in a past life.

Mercedez Benz

Rachael was invited to participate in a different kind of race involving dogs, popular in Europe called dryland racing. It is where the dogs pull their racers along either on carts, bicycles, or on-foot (canicross). Rachael ran behind a dog along a course, much like a cross country race. She was tethered to the dog with a harness and they raced together. Obviously, this is not your run of the mill event, and Rachael is not your run-of-the-mill athlete. She is legally blind. 

Rachael’s participation in this event exposed us to not only a beautiful part of Italy, Ravenna, known for it’s mosaics, but also a new and interesting competition, that as Americans we hadn’t been exposed to.

I’ve put together a list of 20+ anniversaries of historical events that will be acknowledged in 2011 in a variety of ways. Some of the listed anniversaries will have events planned around them. Choose one or more of these to include in your next custom designed vacation.