Travel News

PeterGreenberg.com Contributor Contest Winner: Meet Marie LeRose

Locations in this article:  Atlanta, GA Chicago, IL San Diego, CA San Francisco, CA

Our PeterGreenberg.com Contributor contest was a close race, but contributor Marie LeRose managed to win hearts and a whopping 57 percent of your votes. Learn a little bit more about this family traveler and then register your answer to our next contest.

Tell us a little bit about you and your family.

I grew up in Boston, since then I’ve lived in Florida, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and now San Diego. We have four children, ages 9, 12, 12 and 13. I used to be a full times sales executive for a consulting firm and now I just do it part time and mostly spend time with my family. I moved around a lot for school, I graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in Business Administration.
My husband Mike is from Chicago and we have been married for 18 years; he’s a consultant for a software implementor and has the same passion for travel.
Your family has traveled around the world. How did you put together your trip?
I have two girls and two boys: Gabriela (13), twins Sophia and Grayson (12) and Christian (9). Around the world was their first big adventure outside of the country. We decided to pick places to expose them to different countries and cultures. We’re trying to do far-from-home trips where they each pick a country and they will each have to do research on that country and they have to pick activities to do on that country and then present it to the family.
We hit Egypt when we went around the world two years ago and their favorite country was Vietnam. When we did our round-the-world trip we supported a school, a rural school in Vietnam and raised money for them through lemonade stands; Le Ly Hayslip has an organization in San Diego, she wrote a book about her life in this village during the Vietnam War, and started an organization called the Village Foundation. We helped by contributing money to three of her top students with supplies for school.
Beyond your trip, what does family travel look like for your clan?
We like to support local charities as we travel. There’s an organization down here called Kids Korps that we’ve been members of for 8 years, it’s a youth volunteer organization. We are teaching our children the lesson to give back to our community.
Aside from our trip around the world, we have hundreds of soccer games, baseball games and volleyball games in between. We love to ski, we just got back from Telluride. We’re planning on going to Mammoth in April; the kids all started when they were 3 and they’re big snowboarders and Mike and I ski. We usually do 15 days of skiing a year.

 Stay tuned this month for Marie’s first article on PeterGreenberg.com, click here to read her winning answers and remember to register your answer in our new contest.

By Tatiana Rodriguez for PeterGreenberg.com. Photos credit Marie LeRose