LOS ANGELES -- Dagmar Tomlinson is the grandma you wish you had or hope you will be.

At 85, the retired legal secretary from Pacific Palisades on the west side of Los Angeles has given 12 of her 15 grandchildren a rare eighth-grade graduation gift: a trip with her anywhere in the world they choose.

In the past 18 years she has journeyed to Africa, Australia and Patagonia. She has taken grandchildren glacier climbing and river rafting.

"She took me to Alaska," said Austin Bellows, 15, of Santa Cruz, about her 2006 grad trip. "And we hiked and -- wait, you know she bungee-jumped off a bridge, right?"

Yes, evidence does exist.

Leafing through photo albums in her 1949 ocean-view home, Tomlinson narrates stories of her own travels, some with her four adult children, most with her grandkids.

"These are pictures of our trip to Costa Rica," Tomlinson said of photos of her and then-15-year-old granddaughter Marisa Arellano in orange life vests and helmets on a trip riding rapids. In another photo, only her frilly swimsuit and white curls are not caked in mineral mud.

Tomlinson has no eighth-graders graduating this spring, but she was in Seattle last week for grandson Ian Tomlinson's high school graduation. She's already taken him to Ireland.

"We did a ton of stuff, and it was a blast," Ian, 18, said from his home in the Seattle suburb of Federal Way.

A rock guitarist, Ian wrote comic limericks with his grandmother on their 2005 trip to the Emerald Isle.

"She's not," he added, "your typical grandma."

Tomlinson's youngest three grandchildren are 9, 10 and 11. She's thinking of taking all three on a Disney cruise or to a dude ranch. When her oldest granddaughter, Chelsea Schlunt, 28, of Santa Cruz, asked why her grandma wasn't waiting until they reached eighth grade:

"She laughed and said, 'For God's sake, Chelsea, I'd be 91!'" Schlunt said.

(Schlunt's choice for her graduation trip was to visit Prince Edward Island, where "Anne of Green Gables" was set. Her grandma deemed it underwhelming and added a three-week, cross-country train ride with sleeper car to the itinerary.)

The trips began in 1989, after Tomlinson's husband of 46 years died of prostate cancer. Her firstborn grandchild, Damian Arellano, now 30 and living in San Francisco, wanted to visit Eastern Europe at age 12.

Tomlinson saw that the Passion play was to be performed in Germany's Black Forest, which happens only every 10 years.

"That was a one-time thing," she said, her silver dangly earrings catching sunbeams in her living room. "But you know, Damian's sisters started in with, 'What about us? We want to go on a trip too.' And I thought, 'Well, why not?' "

So began what the family now calls "the grandma trip." She thinks she's planted the understanding in each child that the world is a big, beautiful place. Most of them keep traveling after their grandma trip, sometimes with her.

She worked as a secretary; her husband made commercial plane gyroscopes before going into engineering. She got a job at a prominent law firm. Her mother lived with them. "I was lucky, because I lived in the Palisades, worked in the Palisades, and my kids could be cared for in their home," she said. "I always loved working."

One of the law partners, Eric Scudder, had become like family, and when he died in 1975, he left his home, designed by architect Cliff May, to his trusted secretary.

Elton retired early from an aerospace company, the couple rented out their original Palisades home, and the proceeds helped them travel the world.

In recent years, Tomlinson has been making $75 an hour as the personal assistant to the widow of Meredith Willson, who created "The Music Man."

She likes the part-time work, she said recently, from a rental car zooming along a Minnesota country road. Crammed in with her were three grandchildren, a great granddaughter and her daughter, Colleen Bellows, 42.

The Bellows family, of Santa Cruz, was taking the afternoon off from a vitamin sales convention in Minneapolis, to which they had invited matriarch Tomlinson.

"She's so much fun, we always want her with us," said Austin, 15, from the back seat, her grandmother riding shotgun. "She took me, my brother and my friend to Disney World a few months ago, and my brother was the one to whine about all the walking. My friend has Annie's picture on her MySpace page," said Austin, using the nickname Tomlinson got when her firstborn grandchild as a toddler tried to say Granny and called her Annie.