Elderhostel provides a new way to teach and learn. (The Last Laugh).

At the insistence of a tennis team buddy who fancies herself a travel-agent-in-training, four of us trundled off to our first Elderhostel program last month. It was the right price, the right time and the right place: $629 including room and board, and held just after we finished the September issue. The place one of the seven natural wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon.

Age affects learning

For a whippersnapper like me, interacting with elders for a week was a lesson in itself. I didn't overreact when Phil told me he lost his car, wandering around the motel parking lot like a lost puppy. He thought his rental car was white, not the gray one parked in front of his room.

After about 20 minutes on the shuttle back to the airport at Phoenix, a woman missed her purse with the tickets in it, having left it in the motel dresser drawer for safe-keeping. We turned around, and there it was.

Our main instructor was Mike Young, a 5Oish man who had given up adjunct teaching to lead elderhostel programs. Asked the difference between students of traditional age and elderhostelers, he said, "Traditional students may or may not come to class, may or may not stay awake, may or may not pay attention. Elderhostel students always show up, on time and alert, asking pertinent questions. Then they forget the whole thing."

Mike planned optional forays for those of us without canes. We got to hike down into the canyon from a rim viewing point, scramble up rocks to get a great view of the Colorado river where we had been swimming in the red silty water, and have a breathtaking picnic lunch on the rim.

My experiential learning