Hi my name is Geoff and I've just joined the Forum after discovering it a few weeks back.
I live in London and the only other surviving member of my close family is my eldery mother who lives in Suffolk.
I do have two "adopted" families here in London, one with local origins, the other originally coming from Gujarat in India who settled in London 20 years ago.
My earliest recollection of Goa was from my late father's stamp collection and a member of my local London adopted family visiting there in 1984.
Until a few years back other parts of the World had occupied my attention, most of my travels were for work to non-tourist destinations. After 34 years of work I took early retirement in 2002.
Over New Year 2003/4 I was invited by my Gujarati "family" to their daughter's wedding in Gujarat. Having not visited India before I decided to make a longer tour of it and stayed on after the wedding. I did a tour by train to Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Udiapur. My flight back home was from Bombay so I decided to leave Gujarat a few days early and spend a weekend in Goa before returning home. My "family" have friends who run a travel agency in Bombay and they booked all the train trips and hotels for me. They took my request for "good hotels" as being 4 or 5 star and in Goa they got me at weekend at the Taj Holiday Village. Needless to say I instantly fell in love with Goa and decided to return on a regular basis.
In January 2005 I returned for two weeks at the Taj and this was the first time I'd ever travelled on a package tour or on a charter flight.
In January/February 2006 I went back again, this time to Gujarat for January and Goa for February. Because I planned the two trips separately and I was travelling with different people to Goa, I ended up travelling by air from Bombay to Goa via Gatwick and Heathrow with a short stopover back home. I stayed again at the Taj (despite the price!) and my friends on a lower budget stayed at the Dona Alcina in Candolim.
During this trip we got caught by the timeshare scratch-card guys in the street in Candolim. At first I would not have anything to do, but my friends said we should go along with them if only for a free bottle of wine. A few hours later we somehow found ourselves signing up for two separate timeshares, one for me, one for my two friends. I had looked at the deal offered and found even if the hype was only partly true that I'd make a "profit" in four years over staying at the Taj.
So, in November 2006 I took up the first of my timeshare allocations - one week at the Royal Palms in Benaulim and one week at the Royal Goan at Monterio on the Baga River.
I'm now booked for three weeks back at the Royal Palms in Benaulim in just over two weeks time from 3rd February.
I've quite a few comments on some of the existing threads so hope I can contibute to some of them without being too much of a Newbee pain.
Geoff