By day, she’s an information systems business analyst for M-CARE. In her free time, Katie Wilson dons her trip director hat and sees the world with the Nomads travel club.
The group bills itself as “America’s finest air travel club,” whose members sign up for trips throughout the United States and around the world.
Wilson and her husband, John, are one of 10 pairs of volunteer directors who oversee every detail for four of the club’s nearly 60 trips annually. The Detroit-based group of more than 13,000 members, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in August, owns a Boeing 727 and flies out of its own terminal at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
A trip director since 1998, Wilson has traveled more than 200,000 miles to three continents, visiting destinations as far as China, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Europe, and she also has flown to several cities within the United States.
“My husband and I have always enjoyed traveling and we have coordinated several trips with our close friends,” Wilson says. “But being Nomads as well as trip directors has provided us with many wonderful opportunities to visit destinations we never thought possible.”
While she reaps the rewards of being a trip director, she also works 10 to 20 hours per week planning trips. This can include booking hotels, arranging ground transportation, and planning meals, tours and activities. She even serves as a flight attendant. So if you ask her how to open and close airplane doors, operate emergency equipment and serve meals from 30,000 feet, she’ll know how. Wilson learns and updates these skills every year when she and John attend a one-day FAA certification training.
Each trip starts the previous year, when all directors meet to bid on a list of destinations they’d like to visit in the coming year. It can take anywhere from seven to nine months to plan a trip.
Some of the club’s most popular trips are to the Caribbean in winter and New York City or Paris for Christmas shopping. Mystery trips also typically sell out. On these getaways, only the trip directors and crew know where they’re going. Travelers learn beforehand the climate of their destination, and that’s about it. This year, the Wilsons are planning two such trips.
Some of her favorite destinations include Italy, where she toured Florence, Rome, Naples, and other cities nestled along the Amalfi Coast. She’s also experienced the wonder of standing on the Great Wall of China.
“It was a life-enriching experience,” she says. “It was unbelievable. It goes on for miles and miles and miles.”
While in China, Wilson cruised down the Yangzi River, which since has been dammed.
And while sitting in a dinghy off the coast of Alaska, she not only saw whales and sea lions up close and personal, but also experienced a “mini-tsunami” when several large chunks of a glacier broke off and fell into the water. A 25-foot wave of water hurtled toward the group, as members rode out the wave in a small boat.
On her journeys, Wilson has experienced the kindness of many people, most notably in Vienna, where the Nomads were vacationing Sept. 11, 2001. Scheduled to come home Sept. 12, they were unsure when they would be allowed to return. The group extended its stay and was the second plane to fly into Detroit after the terrorist attacks.
“The Austrians were very sympathetic,” she says. “We stayed three extra days and were treated wonderfully.”
Wilson hears from club members that she should take an African Safari, but with young grandchildren in the picture, her travel goals might change.
“Our children are Nomad members, so that automatically makes our two little grandsons Nomad members. So I’m sure there are trips with them in our future,” Katie says. “Disney, here we come!”
