About Us
Welcome to our European Experiences website! We’re Kathy and Charley Wood, passionate European travelers and the founders of European Experiences.
For most of our careers, we worked in the corporate world. Kathy spent 25+ years as a Human Resources executive, and Charley spent most of his career in sales. We discovered European travel on our honeymoon trip, and it’s changed our lives. In Europe we’ve found everything we enjoy, in the most beautiful places we’d ever imagined. Now we love sharing the special places we’ve discovered in Europe with others. Our backgrounds have also given us excellent preparation for organizing trips and working with people.
In the past 19 years we’ve made 23 trips to Europe, 15 of them involving our daughter Kelly (now 17). One trip was more than a year, and the last four years we’ve been able to spend most of the summer in Europe. Our travels have taken us to 16 European countries, usually involving the “slow travel” approach of spending a week or more in each place. We’ve especially enjoyed our seven long-distance walking trips, including a 192 mile walk across England in 2004. We love the great cities of Europe, but we’re most drawn to the countryside, mountains, and smaller villages- the special places we’ll visit in our European Experiences trips.
After taking a family sabbatical in 2004-2005 to travel and live in Europe for 14 months, we decided to change direction. We launched our Luberon Experience trips and pursued flexible careers that would enable us to develop and lead trips in Europe several months each year. Charley is now semi-retired and has a part-time home renovation business. In addition to our work with European Experiences, Kathy is a professor in the College of Business Administration at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches international management and international business strategy. She has also been involved on several internet travel sites and teaches a popular class in UT’s non-credit program, “Planning Your European Vacation.” You can find a list of her internet European travel articles and trip reports here.
Our first Luberon Experience trips were in September 2006, and we’ve since welcomed 23 groups to Provence, the Cotswolds, the Salzkammergut, and Bavaria. Our groups have enabled us to get to know wonderful people from all over the world, and we’ve formed many lasting friendships. Many Luberon travelers asked us about the possibility of joining us for a similar experience in other parts of Europe that we love. In 2009 we expanded to include a few other trips each year and offered back-to-back weeks in the Salzkammergut of Austria and the Bavarian Alps of Germany. In 2010 we offered The Cotswolds Experience for the first time, and in 2011, we’ll host two groups in the Chianti region of Tuscany. It’s been fun to prepare for these new trips and to share other treasured places in Europe with old and new friends.
This is more than just a business for us! We know the needs, expectation and interests of travelers, because we’re travelers too. We truly love sharing special places with others and creating unique experiences, lasting memories, and “best ever” vacations.