Opening and Thanks
The venue for this month’s CNO 2.0 meeting on Thursday, August 20, 2026, was North Sea Brewing at 8150 Washington Village Drive, Centerville. Greg Fay welcomed everyone to a room that was new to the club and fit the group perfectly, and he thanked co-owner Matthew Greene and his staff for hosting the evening and putting out the food. North Sea Brewing is still in its soft opening and is aiming for a mid-September grand opening with entertainment lined up, so keep an eye on its social media.
Club Updates
For the guests in the room, Greg Fay shared what the Centerville Noon Optimist club is all about: over 50 years of making an impact on everything to do with youth in our community. The club raises about a quarter million dollars a year. Recent highlights include:
- The club presented its largest recent donation, $50,000 to the Washington-Centerville Public Library, a gift that made the Dayton Daily News.
- The Board approved a $3,000 donation to Centerville Destination Imagination.
If you would like to learn more about the club, reach out to the member who invited you or to Greg.
Announcements
Euchre Club Social
Connie Risch announced that the next club social will be Euchre on Friday, September 11, 2026. The details are still coming together, so watch the Member Calendar for the sign-up.
Avenue of Flags Labor Day Display
Greg Fay reported that the Avenue of Flags, which has become the club’s biggest fundraiser, will soon put out flags for its Labor Day display. He announced that subscribers will see their flags go up on September 2 for a display covering both Labor Day (9/7/26) and Patriot Day (9/11/26).
Optimist 2.0 Committee Meeting
The Optimist 2.0 Committee will meet on Thursday, September 3, 2026, at 5:30 PM to plan the September meeting. If you have ideas for speakers, venues, or activities, or you think you could flip the whole program upside down and make it better, the committee would love to have you.
September CNO 2.0 at Yankee Park
Next month’s CNO 2.0, on Thursday, September 17, 2026, will be the program’s first outdoor meeting, held at the club’s shelter at Yankee Park where we will play bingo. Thank you to Fred Polizzi for lining up the venue.
Looking Ahead
Tri-Star Soccer is coming up on October 2nd and the Haunted Trail follows on October 13th and 14th.
The Peripatetic Traveler with Tamara Gonzalez Oberbeck
Jean Pummill put her friend and former schoolmate on the CNO 2.0 radar months ago, and this month the wait ended. Gonzalez Oberbeck is a Dayton native and a graduate of Sinclair College’s Nursing program who went on to earn a Master’s degree in Health Education. Her 35-year career took her to Honduras, Barbados, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as a resident nurse for the American Embassy, a Peace Corps Medical Officer, and a Prevention of Blindness Instructor for the International Eye Foundation. In retirement she returned to the Peace Corps and spent two years in a small rice village in Madagascar with no running water and no electricity. She has since traveled solo through 43 countries, and she writes about all of it on her blog, My Timshel, named for her favorite novel, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
“Peripatetic,” Not “Pathetic”
Tamara opened with the story behind her title. After a dinner spent trading travel stories, one of the guests wrote the hostess a note about how wonderful it had been to meet her peripatetic friend. Tamara first misread the word as “pathetic,” and a talk title was born. She also set expectations for the visuals: she cannot make a fancy slideshow and does not know TikTok or much about AI, but she can write in cursive, do long division, and tell time on a clock with hands, so there is that.
The $30-a-Day Challenge
Several years ago Tamara kept hearing people her age say they would travel if they had the money. She decided to prove that money is not the obstacle, donned a single backpack, and challenged herself to travel through Europe for three months on $30 a day. She went over budget, but only to $40. When a reunion classmate suggested those were things you are supposed to do when you are young, the 63-year-old answered that she is young; that is why she is doing it. Three months alone in Europe was not enough, so after her Peace Corps service in Madagascar she sold her house and belongings and set out to travel as a nomad for a year; it ended up being almost three. Coming of age, she has learned, is not just for the young. Travel can transform you at any age, instilling boldness, confidence, and strength, and she thinks it even made her sweeter, though her sister might not agree.
Don’t Be Afraid
People constantly ask Tamara whether she is afraid, and her answer is no; she has never had a problem. Ninety percent of what you worry about never happens, and fear, she said, is just “False Evidence Appearing Real.” You are not discovering new continents; there is a well-worn travel trail and plenty of people to help you along it.
Solo travel is also good for you. Tamara recently read that traveling alone is one of the most powerful forms of brain work, building learning, memory, decision-making, and problem-solving; it does for the brain what exercise does for the body. Her proof was Mira, a woman she met on a hotel patio in Madagascar: a UN veteran who spoke five languages and was traveling alone at 83. When Tamara offered to help her up, Mira pushed her away; if she needed help getting up, she had no business traveling in Madagascar by herself.
Working Her Way Around the World
Tamara pays her way with what she calls gigs, found through services like HelpX, Workaway, and Trusted House Sitters. A gig trades three or four hours of work a day for a bed and a meal, so while one lasts she pays for almost nothing. She has separated lavender on an organic farm with Benedictine monks in Hungary, taught English in Poland, Korea, and Bulgaria, cooked for an American basketball player in the Netherlands, worked an oyster farm in Japan and a honeybee farm in Croatia, and dog-sat in Dublin. The man she taught English to in Poland gave her a furnished flat on the Baltic Sea and, in place of meals, delivered a bottle of red wine to her doorstep every Friday.
Friends Along the Way
Between gigs Tamara stays in hostels, and she prefers them. Close a hotel door and you are alone; a hostel fills a room with six or eight travelers and a community room with their stories. Dog-sitting in rainy Ireland, she passed time at the library up the street, where two boys from St. Patrick’s Catholic school were researching Elvis Presley for a school project on America. Tamara’s son lives in Nashville, so she told them about Graceland, and before long every boy in the library had gathered around the real American in the building.
In a dark hostel dorm in Madagascar, a man with very little English announced, “I sleep with you, okay?” The men’s dorm was full, and he could take a bed in the women’s dorm only if the women said yes. In the morning Tamara showed him the breakfast spot where coffee and eggs cost 33 cents apiece, learned he was an Egyptian her age who travels three months at a time, and talked him onto a bus heading south. Only after waving goodbye did she realize she had never asked his name.
Traveling Cheap
Once you are in Europe, getting around is inexpensive: FlixBus, trains, budget carriers like Wizz Air, and BlaBlaCar, the ride-share that matches drivers and riders partly by how much they like to talk. Deals find her, too; when a $70 one-way fare from Belgium to Marrakesh popped up on her phone, she went. She packs a single backpack on the theory that all you need is less and love, since a thrift store anywhere can supply a sweater or a rain jacket you leave behind when you move on. She eats from hostel kitchens, mostly bread, cheese, and tuna, always treats herself to a nice cup of coffee, and has taken cooking lessons in Italy, in Japan, and on a small island off Honduras, where she stayed for free by helping make the pizzas on pizza night.
Advice from the Embassy Nurse
Two practical tips carried the weight of her career. First, do not skip travel insurance; it covers your gear, trip cancellation, delays, and emergencies, not just health. Second, if you get into trouble abroad, call the U.S. Embassy. As an embassy nurse in Guatemala, Tamara evaluated the local hospitals and doctors so diplomats would have vetted care, and every embassy can refer you to a doctor or hospital it trusts.
Slow Down and Skip the Plan
Her travel philosophy is to minimize planning. She chooses a direction, finds an inexpensive flight (Madrid for $550 round trip, for example), pays a little extra so the ticket can change, and works the rest out on trains and buses. Hurrying through 20 cities in 20 days leaves you with photographs, stress, and a flurry of experiences; traveling slowly is more fulfilling and forges stronger connections. Plan too much, she warned, and there is no room for the happy accidents of travel, like the butcher shop in Poland with more kielbasa than she had ever imagined. She closed with a thought she borrowed from travel writer Pico Iyer, that we travel first to lose ourselves and next to find ourselves, and with her own status report: she has not been everywhere, but it is on her list.
Questions from Members
Asked about her next adventure, Tamara said she will help a couple outside Prague who have a five-year-old and a garden, then continue to Slovakia. She also told the club what happened when her Carroll High School classmates shipped boxes to her village in Madagascar. They built a library at the local Catholic school in Carroll’s name, where the kids love the books, even if Winnie the Pooh and the talking train took some explaining in Malagasy. The late Mike Hornet, who owned an insurance company, sent a box of click pens; the village had only ever seen pens with caps, and people knocked on her door asking for one until she ran out. Classmates even shipped mustard and mayonnaise packets in boxes that sometimes cost over $300, took six months to arrive, and ended with a six-hour bus ride to collect.
Thank You
Thank you, Tamara Gonzalez Oberbeck, for taking the club to so many countries and for such real stories about what you found there. The evening also happened to be Tamara’s birthday, so the club sent her off with the world’s worst version of “Happy Birthday,” sung to a standard the noontime crowd would be proud of.