Dora Benley, the World Traveler:
Dora Benley had no idea when she set out on our journey with her parents on May 1, 1915 to England that she was embarking on a lifetime of travel. The young woman at that time was a college student at Bryn Mawr College for young women and had never been abroad before. She had probably not been much of anywhere except Pennsylvania, driving between her native haunts of Pittsburgh where she grew up to Philadelphia where she was attending school and where her parents had another estate in the King of Prussia area called Maymont.
Dora Benley experienced a rough and sudden indoctrination into the world of travel. She embarked on the Lusitania in Manhattan on May 1, 1915. A German torpedo sank it on May 7, 1915 off the coast of Ireland. Dora swore to get revenge on the Germans who sank her ship and killed some of her friends. She joined forces with Edward Ware and later married him, becoming Lady Ware. In the cause of fighting Germans and keeping the Lawrence maps, key to world domination, away from them she traveled to England, Germany, Italy, France, Gibraltar, Chicago, Yellowstone, the Petrified Forest, Santa Fe, San Diego, the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, Scotland, Denmark, and more places than you can count. She kept a wardrobe and suitcase packed at the Savoy Hotel in London just because she never knew where she and her husband, the Colonel, were going to be sent next as spies in the service of Winston Churchill.
The best way to appreciate Dora Benley and her travel itinerary is to read the Edward Ware Thrillers at War Series starting with Key to Lawrence Special Edition and continuing with 1935 Plot, Dark Horse, and other novels yet to be published.
