December 2023

I know this is a strange place to start Chanukah but in order to tell the story of the Next Chapter of finding a new place to live, I thought we needed a summary of the ATW 2023 ... in a little different way.

Willie Geist and the Wonderful People from Sunday Today
I’m sure you get many stories from dedicated viewers that want to have their one second of fame as they photograph their Sunday Today Mug in various beautiful situations and places around the World. The first time we sent you a photo was with me and my son on fathers’ day in 2019 after my wife bought me the mug for me as a gift to be part of my Sunday morning ritual … but it never made on air. I loved that photo but understood that you can’t show every picture from everyone.

Although I drink my coffee from the mug every Sunday morning while watching, we have resisted sending in any more photos until NOW. My wife, Karen, and I just completed a SIX month Around the World trip. We visited 5 continents, 41 countries, and 96 cities and our blog has 377 entries in it and 6,000 photos. With each and every day bringing us new experiences to see and things to do and to learn, we loved every experience.

We took 63,000 photos in total and 800 of them were Sunday Today Mug Shots! Yes, 800 photos in 96 places across the World. Everywhere we went, we started or ended the day with Willie Geist and our Sunday Today Mug. We could send you all 800 but that would require you to dedicate an entire hour-long program just to showing our photos of places in the World that was visited by your distinctive Sunday Today Yellow Mug. We are guessing that is not going to happen. Instead, we are enclosing 10 collages that cover all 96 places hoping you can find a way to show all of them on your program to point out some of your biggest fans.

It was so special and poignant to complete this project. On a trip that varied every day for 180 days with no two experiences the same but all wonderful, we also knew that consistency in life is important. For us, we were dedicated to have one consistency everywhere we went. That stability and invariability for us was using our Sunday Today Mug! The irony of this “experience” was that the Mug made it to 96 places and photos were taken after the mug was carried to some difficult and dangerous places and often stored in precarious places. We traveled from LA to SF and left the Country and 180 days later got back to SF. It survived until “the last mile”. On our way from there back to LA, it broke (see the last photo).

Bruce & Karen WintersRead more