Victoria Clipper Vacations

Colleagues to help in Japan disaster relief

Three workers are heading to Japan to personally show the victims of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that Bermuda is thinking of them.

Takeshi Iwaguchi, Bror Muller and Victoria Clipper are to travel 7,500 miles to help complete strangers who had their lives ripped apart by the natural disaster in March.

Their task is three-fold as they will hand over a cheque raised by Bermuda�s milk-carton fundraising appeal, give out 1,000 origami cranes made by Warwick Academy students and help volunteers with the clean-up operation.

Japanese reinsurance company Tokio Millennium Re is funding the nine-day trip for its three employees, who were randomly selected.

Assistant vice president Mr Iwaguchi, who is from Tokyo, said: �When I heard about what had happened in Japan, I felt terrible.

�I�m in Bermuda when my family and friends are in Japan, all I could do was send them money.

�But now I am going to them and helping them in any way I can. I want to make life more comfortable for them.�

It will be the first time Mr Muller, from New Zealand, and Ms Clipper, from Bermuda, have been to Japan.

The trio will leave Bermuda on June 11 and will arrive in Tokyo 24 hours later. They will then travel by train to Sendai, which is about 2.5 hours north of Tokyo.

They will also hand over tens of thousands of dollars to Japan�s Red Cross to help fund re-building work. This money was raised when Tokio Millennium Re teamed up with MS Frontier Re to collect donations through a milk carton appeal in Bermuda�s stores and restaurants.

They will also go into hospitals, schools and refugee centres to give out the origami cranes, which symbolise hope and love. Warwick Academy P4 students made them and added heartfelt handwritten messages.

The team also hopes to take photos of Bermuda with them to explain to the Japanese victims who they are and where they are from.

Mr Muller, who works in the IT department, said he was �proud and honoured� to be going to Japan, and he stressed it was �so much more� than a vacation.

He said: �I�m sure it�s going to affect me dramatically. You see things on the news but that feels more like a movie.

Clipper Vacations Blog · Snoqualmie Middle School Concert Choir ...

Dean Snavely, the Director of Music at Snoqualmie Middle School, tells us about their class trip to Portland, Oregon.

We are a group of 31, thirteen and fourteen year old boys and girls and 6 adult chaperons. We traveled to the University of Portland for the Best of the NW choral festival. This is a competitive choir festival judged by some of the most qualified adjudicators on the west coast. This was our first time to the festival and we found it to be a fantastic choral opportunity for the kids.

Our group traveled via Amtrak to Portland the morning of our festival. The travel was simple and well organized; the staff at the train station and onboard was spectacular! The rail staff put all of our group on one train car which not only made supervision easy, but also spared the “other” riders 30+ middle schooler’s antics!

Upon arrival, we rode the Portland lightrail system to our hotel and changed into our performance attire. The hotel staff at the Red Lion was helpful and well prepared for our group. Once changed, we took the lightrail and then boarded a bus for the University of Portland. The campus is in a fairly “tough” part of town and the bus ride was a bit of an adventure for some of the kids, safe, but colorful to say the least. The kids performed quite well and then boarded a bus back to the hotel. After some time to change and relax, the kids boarded the lightrail to downtown Portland to shop and eat at Pioneer Place. They returned to the hotel and were down for the night.

The next day we went on “Mr. Snavely’s super green, public transportation tour of Portland”. This included: NW 23rd, Union Station, Pioneer Square, Riverfront, the Portland Skytram and concluded with a couple hours at Powell’s Bookstore. We returned to Union Station to board our northbound train and (with a small broken train issue) were picked up by our bus at the Tacoma station to return to the parents before 11pm.

It was a spectacular trip and the planning by the Victoria Clipper staff made it so incredibly simple.

If you have a big group trip to plan look no further than Clipper Vacations for your group travel plans .

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