Business fills a niche for adventurers with developmental disabilities.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

Amelia Abel had been to "The Happiest Place on Earth" before, but she'd never been there without her parents. Not until this past summer.

Thanks to Eugene-based Trips Inc. Special Adventures, the 17-year-old Sheldon High School senior with Down syndrome went to Disneyland without Mom and Dad.

The trip probably wouldn't have happened if Jim and Leslie Peterson hadn't moved next door to the Abels on Eugene's College Hill about a year ago. Bruce Abel, Amelia's father, got to talking with Jim Peterson, Trip Inc.'s owner, who told Abel about the business he began in 1991 that takes developmentally disabled adults from across the country on vacations worldwide.

Now, Bruce Abel is a believer. He's even thinking of volunteering as a chaperone for future Trips' vacations.

"I think it's an incredible organization," Bruce Abel says. "Trips steps up and fills that void."

The business is starting a new feature called "Young Adventurers" that will offer vacations exclusively to developmentally disabled people ages 16 to 22.

High school-age and young adults with developmentally disabilities "get left out of a lot of things," Jim Peterson says. "A lot of these kids, they've never done a trip without Mom and Dad."

Trips - which offers vacations for adults ranging from a $1,095, four-day trip to the Pendleton Round-up to a $3,595, 10-day excursion to Germany and Austria - will offer two four-day trips next summer exclusively for ages 16 to 22. There's a July trip to Disneyland and an August trip to San Diego.

Disneyland is by far the most popular vacation package that Trips offers, says Leslie Peterson, Trips communications director who, like most of the business' seven full-time employees, often accompanies groups on vacations.

"It will probably be a challenge with this (new) program, with the parents, to let their babies go," Leslie Peterson says.

It's going to take a couple of parents to say it's OK, we've done this before, Jim Peterson says.

Don Hadley of Springfield admits that the first time his son, Derek, went on a Trips vacation, he was a bit worried.

It was the summer of 2004, and 19-year-old Derek, who has high-functioning autism, was going to Disneyland. "A lot of things can happen on a trip," Hadley says. Autistic people are used to a lot of structure in their lives, he says. But Hadley was comforted after visiting the Trips' office in an old home on West Seventh Avenue, the one with the five dogs running around and the walls plastered with photographs from the business's many excursions over the years.

"You could immediately tell by talking to them that they'd seen a lot of behaviors and they were fully equipped," he says. Derek, now 23 and a 2004 graduate of Springfield High School, has been on three Trips excursions since that first one, and is planning yet another one next year, his father says.

Trips has about 250 volunteer chaperones from around the country whose expenses are paid for when they supervise groups of anywhere from a few to 20 or more, Leslie Peterson says.

Rhonda Reed, Trips travel and accounting manager, who just returned from chaperoning a group of developmentally disabled adults in Scotland, says it's especially gratifying to see the younger ones get out and do something on their own for the first time.

"They're young, they're excited and they're learning to become independent adults," she says. "And this is just one more way to bring them full circle as independent adults."