After many conversations regarding how travel enriches one’s life, we (high school Spanish teachers, Jewel Rozanski and Gladys Archer, and avid traveler, Matt McKissock founder of McKissock Learning) started Cultured Travel to create fun and awesome learning and cultural experiences through world travel.
In order to keep our experiences epic, we strive to make travel as accessible as we can for all of our participants. We do this by keeping our costs low and going directly to providers and keeping advertising costs essentially non-existent. For us, it’s not about the profits. If you find yourself visiting this page, either you know one of us, you know someone who has traveled with us before, are a friend of a friend in one of the aforementioned categories, or somehow, fate landed you here! It is important to us that each of our trips have and our future trips maintain a friends and family feel from the start of your trip planning process to your return home. Furthermore, awesome group experiences have to include awesome people. This is a huge part in making great memories. Past travelers have asked us: “How do you manage to get a group of so many awesome people in one place at one time?” The answer is simple, we make it clear to everyone that whiny, high-maintenance people who don’t travel well and can’t gracefully roll with the punches should not join a Cultured Travel tour.
On our quasi-organized tours, you should expect a blend of pre-planned activities and time to explore on your own with all of the research and suggestions already done for you. We utilize high quality and scholarly guides – true experts in their fields. Our primary goal is to make each tour an experience you will remember and tell others about for the rest of your lives.
Our motto is simple: “Epic Experiences in Spectacular Places with Awesome People!”
Our Motto:
Epic experiences in spectacular places with awesome people!
Cultured Travel was a 2021 recipient of the Warren County Chamber of Business and Industry’s Excellence in New Business Award.
Matt McKissock
Following my partial retirement from a successful decades-long career as an entrepreneur in the professional licensing education industry, I now spend more time traveling abroad than at home (Warren, PA). I have visited over 30 countries in the past five years alone, and my favorite cities are Istanbul, Cairo, London, Rome and Jerusalem – each of which I regularly return to. I also routinely travel to “my other home” in Tanzania, where I have been active in the establishment, management and oversight of the Majengo Children’s Home, a Tanzanian orphanage supporting 95 severely at-risk children, for over a decade. When I am not otherwise further afield exploring even more remote and exotic locales, or leading others in places more familiar to me, such as Egypt, Istanbul or Tanzania, my family and I enjoy being at home playing Code Words or enjoying time in the outdoors. Among the many delights of travel, perhaps the most deeply rewarding for me is when I have the opportunity to nudge great people across the invisible barrier of their comfort zone and limiting beliefs to travel to sublime, unfamiliar places, and engage with others not from their tribe, experiencing first-hand how much more safe, friendly, generous, warm and welcoming the world is than they would ever suspect from staying home and reading the headlines.
Jewel Rozanski
Hola! I am Jewel Rozanski. I have loved to learn through travel ever since I was a little kid and I took trips around the U.S. with my family; many rooted in history. I obtained my undergraduate degree in Spanish Education with a minor in History from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. It was there where I was able to gain my first international travel experience (you don’t count Canada when you live in NWPA) when I studied abroad in Mérida, Mexico. Later, I obtained my Master of Education degree in Educational Psychology also from Edinboro University. I taught Spanish for 14 years and also served as my school district’s curriculum coordinator for World Language for several years. Being a Spanish teacher opened the door for me to travel more and gave me the chance to do what I am so passionate about – showing people the world and providing opportunities for memorable, life-changing learning experiences! As a teacher, I led tour groups nationally and internationally (Chicago, Gettysburg, New Orleans, New York City, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Italy, Mexico, Peru, and Spain). In December of 2020, I became a Certified Travel Advisor through the Travel Institute and in June of 2021, I retired from teaching to jump full time into Cultured Travel. To me, there is nothing more awesome than bringing amazing people together and creating fun experiences that they will reflect upon with joy forever! I am excited to continue to be a catalyst for the adventure seeker in us all.
Tom Chulick
A traveler cannot bring a better burden on the road than plenty of wisdom. It will prove better than money in an unfamiliar place.
– Hávamál
Guten Tag! Tom Bjorkman Chulick here. My journey traveling started from as early as I can remember. Growing up in the Midwest my family traveled around the country on road trips all over the US. As an adult, that fire to travel has only been strengthened and further ignited. I studied History & German at Saint Louis University in Saint Louis and in my junior year I studied abroad at Heidelberg University in Germany. My time in Germany was unbelievable, and allowed me to not only intimately know Germany, but also travel across Europe. Since then I have traveled to: Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Norway, Ireland, England, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Egypt, and Turkiye. In these many lands I’ve called home: a nice bed in a hotel, a spare room in a friend’s house, a tent in the woods, or a simple sleeping mat under the stars out in the wild!
My resume has included these words I wrote long ago, but still ring true to this day: “I have lived my life striving to learn what I can, and to help those that I am able. The challenges I have faced are the foundation of the person I hope to be. Through understanding, we can all make the world a better place.” To me traveling is all about learning and experiencing the people, the history and the cultures of the places we travel. It’s beautiful to learn how similar we all are, to be graciously humbled by the generosity and kindness of complete strangers who become fast friends in homes far from our own. Being able to share these sorts of experiences with others is incredibly rewarding and makes traveling a pleasure! I truly love introducing people to new and wonderful places, which helps us all grow and change for the better! Let’s journey together and see a world of beauty and amazement, and truly embrace being amazing humans!
Stacey Ludwig
Hello! My name is Stacey Ludwig. I have always wanted to be a world traveler, and said that as soon as my three children were grown and gone, I would be off seeing the world. For a number of reasons, that was a dream deferred for about a decade. Several years ago, I determined that I had waited long enough and embraced the philosophy that if at all possible, I was saying “yes” to opportunities that came my way. It has been life-changing! When my friend of many years, Jewel Rozanski, asked if I wanted to travel with her to Egypt on a Cultured Travel tour, I said, “Yes!” It was the most amazing trip, and the start of so much more. We have traveled together on several more adventures, New Orleans, Spain, and just recently, a brand new adventure in Egypt. I love the concept…”epic experiences in spectacular places with awesome people” so much that I am trading in my teaching certificate for my hiking shoes and joining Jewel at Cultured Travel. (I have been a Language Arts teacher in the Warren County School District in Warren, PA for 26 years, and will be retiring June 2024). I have loved my job, teaching young adults about the world through literature, and this feels like the perfect transition. I love watching the “light bulb” come on when students make connections between literature and real life; now I get to do this with adults in fabulous locations with an amazing array of experts in their fields. In my Cultured Travel adventures, I have experienced first-hand the magic of bringing people together who may start out as strangers, but who quickly bond through incredible shared experiences. On most tours, new friends are busy making plans for new adventures before their current tour is over. The number of people who are on their fifth, or sixth…or seventh tours is a testimonial of the success of Jewel and Matt’s vision. I can’t wait to be even a small part of this.
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.
– Isabella Eberhardt