I walked the lonely beach at San Agustanillo, Oaxaca last week–I am a traveler.

Recently there has been a move by niece Michelle to republish the Hensleigh family cookbook–wonderful.

She asked each of us remaining Hensleigh sibs to write a memory of our parents and the farm in Winchester, Kansas. There are of course many–some of them very positive and some to be forgotten.

One of the most vivid and life changing for me relates to how my folks recognized that I loved travel. Of course they did and so perhaps it was just encouraging me and all of us in a direction that they loved and knew was valuable.

But especially my mother recognized on early Colorado trips that I thrived on it. So they pushed me out the door on numerous occasions to go somewhere away and stay as long as I could.

The best trip was when I was twelve and they spontaneously sent me with cousin Doug to California in an old station wagon–a trip that ended up lasting a month or so. This one included the ocean for the first time, the California coast, the Pacific Northwest and then back across Washington, Oregon, Idaho etc back to Winchester.

Now I have this Mexico tour business, taking small groups of curious travelers to the less traveled places of Mexico. Trips like the small group trip to Oaxaca last week are just what I was designed for–and my folks saw it way back then.