It's a good travel company. We've made four trips with them: one to France, two to Canada and one to Mexico, and each of the trips has been uniformly excellent.

But that isn't what impresses me about the company. Rather, it is the number of their mailings and what's in them.

The mailings come in a variety of forms: in 8-¹/2 x 11-inch folded sheets of paper, in magazine-sized brochures and in slick full-color books. The books, of course, don't come as often as the envelopes, but there is a steady stream of magazine-style brochures.

The other thing that impresses me about the mailings is that they are all about the same. In fact, they are the same. They just come in different forms. They are the same trips to the same places, sometimes with the same hotels or ships. It seldom varies from day to day, month to month, year to year.

All of the trips the company offers, for instance, are in the books. The trips are then divided by locale and packaged and mailed as kind of subsections of the whole. A brochure will contain all the company's South American voyages, for instance, or all its Canadian excursions, or all its trips up and down European rivers.

Following on the heels of the brochures come the little letter packets, each an individual trip, just in case we missed the big book or the brochures. The trip up or down the Rhine River in Germany, advertised under the somewhat grandiose title, "Rivers of the Old World," arrives this way.

So there is a certain amount of—well, actually, a lot of—repetition. It's a little like hearing the same commercial over and over again on television.

Or, to put it another way, the company has been offering the same trips in the same places at the same time of the year in and year out for as long as we have had anything to do with them.

Take, for example, the trip through Copper Canyon in Mexico, a popular destination not only for this company, but for dozens of other travel outfits. We made it about three years ago, and so far as I can tell from the brochures, it hasn't changed since.

It starts from Tucson, travels by bus down the Gulf of California coast to El Fuerte, where one boards the train, and eventually comes back to Tucson.

Or the trip by train from Toronto to Vancouver by rail. It's exactly the same as it was when we took it a couple of years ago. The only thing that's changed as far as I can see is that SARS has come and, I hope, gone in Toronto since we were there.

I suppose a certain amount of sameness in travel is inevitable. After all, the places tourists like to go don't change much. Neither does the way one gets there and back. But I sometimes wonder why the company doesn't add something new to its repertoire.

The other thing I wonder about is the size of the company's printing bill. Printing—and mailing—that many pieces of mail every year—has got to be expensive and time-consuming. But it must work. Otherwise why would the company keep on doing it year after year to the same customers (us), even though we have only made four trips in 10 years?

Because of the sheer volume of mailing, I'm sorry to say, these days I have stopped looking at everything we get from the company—letters, brochures and books. First of all, I've seen it all before. Second, there aren't any new trips advertised ... And finally, travel no longer is much fun.

Part of the lack of fun, of course, is that we're getting older and getting to foreign shores gets progressively harder with each year. Part of it is that air travel is so inconvenient, not to say potentially dangerous, that it makes any trip anything but fun.

No one likes the hassle over security, necessary though it may be.

And travel also is getting more expensive. (But then, what isn't?)

None of these hindrances, however, seems to impress our travel company. They keep on sending us brochures in the mail, hoping perhaps that we will want to visit the places where we had a previous good time or that we will suddenly be smitten with the desire to sail around South America, up the Yangtze or to and from St. Petersburg.

So far we haven't, but who knows?

Perhaps they may yet come out with a new set of trips. Perhaps the terrorist alert may fade from its present orange to a dull brown, or, better yet, fade away completely. Perhaps we will grow more supple and restless, ready to leave home for a new adventure, no matter what our age.

Perhaps, but not likely.

Meantime, the mail keeps coming. In fact, it just arrived, so you'll excuse me while I look and see if there really is anything new in it.

You never know. There could be.

I do know one thing for certain.

There'll certainly be a mailing from the travel company.