Dear Traveler,

For those of us who love to explore the world, friendship and travel are intimately connected – asking a traveler about friendship is like asking a fish about water. It’s all around us. There are the friends with whom we set off on our journeys and fellow travelers we befriend along the way. There are guides with whom we build relationships and locals who we meet as strangers and leave as friends. For those of us at TTC, looking back over our first century, friendship has shaped so much of who we are and what we do, in the connections to our guests, our partners, and to each other. The bonds we make stretch through time, across cultures, and around the world.

As we all know, friends are especially important in difficult times, and this year has been the most difficult in recent memory. As we look toward International Friendship Day on July 30, we are particularly appreciative of the friends we have made through travel. To celebrate, those of us at TTC have reached out to our guests and to each other, searching through our memories and our scrapbooks for photographs, stories, and sayings to remind us of friends we have made along the road – and inspire us for the new friends we will be making when our travels resume.

For now, we share these with you hoping they’ll inspire you to recall friendships you’ve made in your travels, and perhaps take the opportunity to reach out to a friend this year on July 30. While circumstances may prevent us from being physically together, we can look forward to the time when we travel again (#whenwetravelagain).

Until then, we’ll get by with a little help from our friends.