Welcome

Greetings Fellow Travelers: Welcome to our first blog entry!

May we introduce ourselves? We are Aurora and Robert Glaze. We live in the mountain setting of Colorado in the United States but spend much of each year as travelers and photographers in Europe, Asia and the islands of the Pacific.

In brief, Aurora is a master gardener and Robert is a master photographer and we love to travel and experience flowers, gardens and nature in formal, informal, rural, residential, urban or wild environments. You can learn more about us in the Tour Directors section when you click on the Gardeners Travel Club button here on the Signature site. We are excited to be a part of the Signature Travel team and look forward to meeting you on a future trip with us.

Through the Gardeners Travel Club and the Signature Photography Schools we hope to share with you our enthusiasm for the natural world and to do so in a way that develops your experience and knowledge as a traveler.

We are very “down to earth people” (a bit of a pun!) who are just as happy to be walking on a muddy path to see brilliant flowers and take memorable images as we would to be at a Kew Gardens social event. We enjoy a great sidewalk food vendor as much as we might savor haute cuisine in Paris. We prefer to travel on trains, trams, public buses or mini-vans when in search of flowers and nature. But most of all, we love to walk, across gardens, parks, cities and …well, we think you get it, we are a lot like you, except we may travel, garden and photograph a whole lot more!

Travel is both a joy and a gift to us. We look forward to the great fun and anticipation of “un-wrapping” every trip we take. We enjoy every new place we visit, plant we discover or flower we photograph. We also don’t think too much, you don’t need unending narration or every minute planned for. We want you to experience places in a new way….with time to observe, study and experience the environment around you.

Maybe you have been to Holland or Amsterdam before. However, we are quite sure you haven’t seen or experienced it from our perspective. We have gone to Keukenhof day after day in a week and it has been different for us each time; sun, rain, clouds, wind, crowds, no crowds. We are there not as tourists but as gardeners and photographers who are in no hurry and have the time to be a part of that spectacular environment. If you have never experienced Holland in Springtime we invite you to join us, if have been to Holland before we invite you to see it again, for the first time.

We want to assist you in learning more about local gardening in the lands we tour by having local gardeners and specialists visit with us at many of the places we visit. As a member of the Gardeners Travel Club you don’t have to be an expert. Whether you have just a few petunias in containers on your condo patio, just planted your first flower garden or are a prize winning competitor in flower shows, you are welcome to be part of our small group for the week.

Every day on every tour we will have a mini workshop on photography techniques for the location and the lighting situations we encounter. Whether you own a compact digital camera, a DSLR set up or just snap photos with your mobile phone; we are not overly technical, we keep reinforcing basic principles of light, composition and perspective that will improve the quality of your images.

Lastly, we are confident that you will enjoy our small group approach, we frequently divide up into two smaller groups of 6-7 and also offer you the opportunity to ‘get lost” and meet up with us later if you want to spend time with a particular area or wait for the lighting to be right for that perfect image. We want to assist you in making the transition from being a tourist to becoming a traveler and each day of our tours we will point out ways to begin to think about travel and yourself in a way that is more integrated and meaningful.

Our Blog will bring forth interesting topics about travel to you……. so keep checking in with us!

See you at the airport!

Aurora and Robert