Wanderlust.

[rivka]

Over Christmas, talking with my sister Debbie, the subject of our 2002 trip to the Florida Keys came up. I said to her, "You know, that was one of the nicest vacations I've taken."

"Wow," she said. "You really haven't traveled much."

It felt like a slap in the face, although I know she didn't mean anything of the kind. It's just... she travels a lot, and she makes enough money, and spends it frugally enough, to go on exotic and exciting trips. Since we went to the Keys together, she's taken a small-boat cruise to the Galapagos, for heaven's sake. She's been to Egypt. She goes sea kayaking in Alaska and hiking in New Zealand.

I had meant to be saying something about how much I enjoyed traveling with her, and what a peaceful and relaxing trip it had been. I wasn't trying to say that I thought the Florida Keys were the best place in the world, based on my extensive survey. I haven't traveled that much - we simply haven't had the money for it, or the time. But I'd like to do more.

So I've been daydreaming. I'm helped along by my discovery of the concept of family adventure travel. It's nice to know that there are other people who think it's perfectly plausible to take a 6- or 8-year-old child on safari to Tanzania, or on a cruise down the Nile, or touring in Vietnam. Further surfing has led me to infant adventure travel, minimum age one year, with possible trips to Turkey, Morocco, Jordan, Lapland, Egypt.

Okay, that last concept might be a little extreme. But it's feeling good right now to have a sense of expanded horizons. In a few years, we might go anywhere.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Doing one doesn't exclude doing the other.

Florida may be exotic physically, compared to Boston, but if you want to see something more than five hundred years old that isn't just archaeology, Europe and Asia have a lot to offer.

Also, other countries have other cultures. People speak different languages. It's a whole paradigm shift different from going somewhere in your own country. Everywhere you go in the US, and some places in Canada, people are going to say "Have a nice day!" to you. That's exotic to me -- I didn't know what the heck to reply to it -- but for you, in the US, there's always going to be that basic level of cultural familiarity, whatever subtle differences there are.

And as I said, you can do both. Z and I went to Arizona on the train. We saw a lot of the US we hadn't seen, a lot of different places and geography. It was fun. We've been talking for years about doing the Trans-Siberian railway if we could afford it. There's a whole planet out there, and your country, large and varied as it is, is just one chunk of it.