I am the owner of our agency and have been active in the travel business for 20 years. In 1995 I began working as an outside agent for a cruise only agency here in Omaha, NE. In 1998 I opened Custom Cruises LLC as a ‘home based’ agency. We immediately became a member of GIANTS, (now Ensemble Travel Group) a travel consortium that focuses on marketing and providing vetted preferred suppliers and generous amenities for our clients. Although the cruise only agency was very successful, the name was too confining. I quickly found that my clients wanted more than ‘just cruises’! So, I soon changed the name to Custom Cruises & Travel. In 2010 my husband and I moved from our large family home (that included my office over the garage) to Swanson Towers, a beautiful condo building in central Omaha, so we moved our business into a store front office in Rockbrook Village.

​My travel experience is vast! When I was a child, we traveled extensively on family vacations taking road trips and going to Florida each year to visit my grandparents in their winter home on Pass-A-Grille Beach, south of St. Petersburg, Florida. (In 1913 my grandparents began that annual tradition. At the time Pass-A-Grille was still an island and they reached it by ferry!) If we didn’t drive to Florida (there was no interstate so took the state highways and the trip took about 5 days from North Platte), we took the train which took about 3 days! When I was 8 I took my first airplane ride, flying from St. Petersburg to North Platte (my hometown) through Chicago and Midway airport on a propeller plane. I continued this tradition with my children up through 1980. (When there were finally jets and jet ways!).

In 1985 I took my first trip to Europe (visiting family in Germany and then a long stopover in Paris on our return) and have traveled overseas somewhere in the world every year since then. In 1990 I took my first cruise (on the QE2 round trip from NYC to Halifax for the 125thanniversary of Cunard and my mother’s 80th birthday) and have taken one or two cruises every year since then. To date, I have sailed on every luxury, every premium and most contemporary cruise lines and also on every US river and/or riverboat. I think you will be impressed and will realize that I probably know more about each cruise line and/or the ship in each fleet than anyone else you know!

I will periodically include a shortened version of my ‘trip letters’ and will often review the ships and itineraries that I have personally experienced. I also plan to give you my thoughts and tips that comprise my ‘travel wisdom’. During my ‘vast’ experience, I have gained knowledge on traveling with children (we had 5 and have 12 grandchildren) and traveling with the elderly. My Mother was my inspiration regarding travel and after my father died, we traveled extensively together. She always wanted to plan a trip to look forward to, so she traveled until she was 94. Her last cruise was on the Queen Mary 2 round trip (again out of New York City) for Mother’s Day weekend in 2004. I always thought it was fitting that my first cruise was with her on Cunard, and then our last cruise together was also on Cunard.