Good afternoon, Kathy, and welcome to Tripatini! It's great to have you with us -- and we think you'll find our site productive as well as interesting and enjoyable.

To get the most out of Tripatini, we recommend you take a moment to join several of our many groups which you may find of particular use, such as Travel Marketers/Publicists, Arizona, Boating/Sailing, Vacation Rentals, Eco/Sustainable Tourism, Italy, Eating/Drinking the World, our Italian language/culture club, and plenty of others covering many other topics and most destinations across the globe.

FYI, on your profile you'll see a green bar marked "Text Box," which you can turn into a box containing not just text but also photos and even videos about yourself, your travels, your company and its clients, and more (you'll help both yourself and our other members by identifying your company name and URL in your profile).

Finally, if you would, please be so kind as to spread the word among your travel-interested friends, family, colleagues, and associates. It's fast and easy to use our "INVITE" function above left on the navigation bar to enter e-mails (even your whole list at once!). Finally, please join our Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter (see front page info box); we'll be happy to reciprocate!

Thanks much for joining us; we wish you an outstanding rest of 2010, and it goes without saying that we look forward to seeing you online.

Cheers!

Kathy, it was about three years ago, on a Tuolumne County press trip run by Geiger and Associates. We were only on the boats about 24 hours, but I made a point of taking the helm, because I've found that some houseboats can hold a course, whereas others cannot, because their bottoms are so flat. This one was pretty good. (Oh, you should have seen me crashing into docks in Sweden and France!) The cabins were comfortable and had all the right bells and whistles; the galley--well, full-size kitchen, really--and lounge area made me happy to sit there for hours.