For Arentsen, moving around with his family when he was young helped create in him a sense of adventure.
“My dad’s job took us all over the place,” Arentsen said. “We were originally from Wisconsin but when I was six, my dad was transferred to Dallas, Texas and then to southern California when I was in junior high school.”
Before graduating high school in Anaheim, Arentsen knew his family was headed to Cincinnati, so he looked into colleges in Ohio.
“I didn’t have much of a chance to visit colleges in Ohio, but my parents did some scouting for me,” he said.
Arentsen attended Miami University where he majored in geology because he knew he wanted to do something “science based.”
That something ended up being a job with Dayton Power and Light, where he worked for 36 years. He also earned his master’s degree in environmental science.
“I was in the corporate environmental department, and I did research and development on alternate energy sources like solar and wind,” Arentsen said.
Holthouse, meanwhile, was growing up in Vandalia. After graduating high school in 1967, she went to Ohio University and majored in history but knew she didn’t want to teach.
“I got married for the first time when I was 21 and after seven years, we divorced,” Holthouse said. “I went back to school at Wright State to get an accounting degree because I figured I could always get a job with that.”
She was hired by Mead corporation to work in their audit department, lived in the DC area for a few years and then moved back to Ohio after her divorce, where she worked for LexisNexis for 19 years.
Credit: unknown
Credit: unknown
“Scott and I met when we were living in the same apartment building in Forest Park,” Holthouse said.
Credit: Scott Arentsen
Credit: Scott Arentsen
One thing the couple had in common was a love of travel. But working full-time limited what time they could spend doing that.
“We didn’t want to take our entire vacation to travel overseas in just one trip,” Holthouse said. “We tried to get around to see the largest of the national parks and we took a lot of long weekend trips.”
In 2014, Holthouse, who is four years older than her husband, retired from LexisNexis. In 2016, Arentsen joined his wife in retirement and they reside in Kettering.
“I give credit to my parents who loved to explore all the new sights every time we moved,” Arentsen said. “This really instilled a love of travel in me that carried through into retirement.”
Holthouse, on the other hand, did not travel when she was growing up and she was anxious to see different places. Though she travelled with Mead about half the time, that only gave her a taste of different cities. And she knew she wanted more.
“We started being methodical about travelling after we retired,” Holthouse said. “Scott would pick one major trip and I would choose another and we would have filler trips in between.”
The couple now has a target of between five or six trips per year. While researching companies that offered tours to different places, Holthouse came upon Road Scholar, which was once known as Elder Hostel. Besides Road Scholar, the couple travels frequently with National Geographic, a company that offers guided tours to locations all across the globe.
“Many of our travels have involved a lot of activity,” Holthouse said. “One of our first trips was to Big Ben National Park in Texas and it was hiking around five miles a day. Scott didn’t think I could do it so he would march me around the neighborhood with a backpack with cans of paint in it!”
That first trip prepared them for the activity they could expect in the future. And they ended up travelling with other people in their age group while learning all about the locations and the natural environments.
“We have two couple friends who often travel with us and every year we decide on a trip and we meet and travel together,” Holthouse said. “We don’t have to worry about all the travel details.”
Arentsen has a passion for photography, so he has taken countless photographs of their adventures, which have ranged from trips to oceans and coral reefs in Florida, to the Cotswolds in England and to St. Petersburg, Russia.
“I have always believed that you are a more empathetic person if you travel,” Holthouse said. “One year we went to India, and it was the most humbling thing I’ve ever been through – seeing other people and how they live and how different it is.
Arentsen agrees that learning about different cultures is insightful and valuable and gives him a better perspective of his own life.
“Memories are so much more important that stuff,” Holthouse said. “I love meeting new people when we travel and find that we can always learn from them.”
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