Sue and Jerry went to Scandinavia on a Rick Steves tour. This is the story of our big father-and-daughter adventure.

When Sue was a kid, the family never went much of anywhere unless it involved moving to a new home, usually on the other side of the country. Ah, those treasured memories of Dad threatening to pull over and leave us at the side of the road. Now that would have been an adventure!

Growing up with a bunch of siblings, Sue never got to do many father-daughter type of things -- and certainly not a father-daughter vacation. We had lots of family vacations to the Oregon coast, but that was about it. It wouldn't have worked out back then, anyway. We both had to become more mature - lots more mature! The deaths of some family friends and relatives at relatively young ages made us realize that we shouldn't put off our dreams forever.

The whole family has watched Rick's travel shows on PBS for years, but we never really thought of going on one of the tours. Our knowledge of tours was limited to what we had heard of peoples' experiences with other tour companies. We pictured ourselves stuck on a bus with a bunch of people we didn't know, herded to places that were nothing more than shopping destinations, missing out on "local flavor" and sites that we really wanted to see. No thanks!

We were always more of the self-guided types. Last year, Sue and husband Tom wandered around Ireland, Rick Steves guidebook in hand. His book pointed us to a lot of great places that we might have missed otherwise, but we knew that there were many other places that we would have enjoyed - if only we could have traveled with someone who knew a little more ...

A family friend, Charlene Evans, had been on a couple (few?) Rick Steves trips before. She raved about how different they were from other tours. She was planning on going on another one, this time to Scandinavia. Jerry had always wanted to see Scandinavia. It didn't take much to get him to sign up. Sue decided to tag along. After all, you never know when you'll get another opportunity to do something like this with your dad.