A Special Section Focusing on Senior Lifestyles
MATURELifestyles Travel
November 2014
A memorable 18 months for an Edina woman: Bhutan, Sierra Leone, Scandinavia BY SUE WEBBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER In the 18 months since she retired from her job as vice president of channel innovation at General Mills, Laurie Greeno has stepped up her travel significantly. To celebrate her retirement from a 27-year career at General Mills, she and her husband, Dr. Edward Greeno, a University of Minnesota physician, traveled to Bhutan for two weeks in October 2013. Bhutan is a country in South Asia, at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains. The country opened to tours in 1974. Visitors are limited to 100,000 a year, according to Laurie Greeno. “There is only one road from one side to the other,” Greeno said. “They want to preserve the character of their country. They are careful about how tourism is executed.” Their group included 16 tourists, a leader, a Bhutanese driver and a tour guide. “One of the reasons we went to Bhutan was that we were curious about the way they measure the development of their country,” Greeno said. “Instead of measuring GDP like most other countries, they measure GNH: Gross National Happiness. It has four basic tenants: ecology, good government, sustainable economic development and preservation of cultural heritage.” Her trip to Sierra Leone came in November 2013, when Greeno traveled with a small non-profit based in Minneapolis called OneVillage Partners, led by Jeff Hall of Edina, an acquaintance of Greeno who was a Peace Corps volunteer in eastern Sierra Leone for two years in the late 1980s.
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Laurie Greeno is shown in Jokibu, Sierra Leone, with Sheku Bockarie, who is wearing a Minnesota Gophers shirt. (Submitted photo) La