lovelytravels

What is vacation anyway? Is it about really relaxing or is it about seeing a bunch of new and stimulating things? Is it about settling in and re-energizing, or is it about taking new risks and discovering something new in yourself? One woman’s cake is another woman’s to-do pile. There is no answer. But then ask yourself these questions: Say you are in China. Your are about to see the Great Wall or the Terra Cotta Soldiers (or maybe you are in Paris to see the Louvre and Eiffel Tower)…Take your pick on venue. And then some great, friendly person comes along and you feel a connection. They are local and have grown up in China (or France) and they really want to bond with you. They say, “You can come stay with me and meet my family, live like a local and I’ll introduce you to friends and fix you dinners…But if you do that you have to come now, and you have to skip the terra cotta soldiers.” There is some pressing time matter so this opportunity is an either-or thing. What do you do? Do you go for the ancient monument, the thing that will be there forever, the thing that everybody KNOWS and will ask you about, or do you go for the relationship, the people experience, the unknown?

There is no right answer, and for some people their answer is immediate and obvious. For others it’s obvious in the other direction, and for others still this is a truly difficult and unknown decision, maybe answered only by a dandelion hair flying by. I try sometimes to formulate a philosophy around my travels, although I’m still working on it. The best way for me to go about it is to look back and decide what travels across the years were the most meaningful, and what it was that worked so well, and focus on those things, and fostering those types of moments again.

So I look back. Thirty-five countries. Travel alone, travel in groups, travel with kids, spouse, parents, siblings, cousins, friends. Classes, free-form travel, scheduled travel. Exotic places, mundane places, rural and urban spots, homestays, volunteerism, study tours, duty vacations. Beaches, mountains, lakes, high-rises, hotels, houses, hostels, hikes. Where do I begin? The trips that really jump out at me are the ones where I have shared them with significant others and we still talk about them. We remember the sardines we bought off a truck we chased, cleaned in a marble sink and fried on the grill of a Portuguese patio. We remember when Andrew ate all the rolls delivered each morning by the bread man and then he looked so happy and so guilty. We remember when Thorne offered to take us all snorkeling and diving in the Mediterranean sea, and he was the only one who didn’t get the beautiful woman leader. He got the surly man who grabbed him by the wetsuit to show him what to do. We remember when Cindy led us all in yoga in the front hall of a perfect fifties-style Palm Springs house, or when Neil and I got like 20 bags of candy each on Christmas Eve in Mexico when we walked around to the village houses. Not to say that adventures alone or with one other are pale by comparison; they don’t. They have their own great beauty and challenges that live on in different ways. But I really have to say, there is something about talking about your trips over and over again with friends and relatives upon return that keeps them alive in a wonderful way. In some ways, the vacations are about strengthening relationships we already have. It makes me want to travel with friends and family more than ever. It is as if I get the trip once, twice, three times. I love that.

But now I guess I’m venturing into memory territory. Because memory becomes what we make it become through sheer repetition of stories. Someday maybe I won’t need to travel. I can just repeat the same story, hear it back from those around me, and get enough pleasure from that. In the meantime, I’m searching for a house in Greece that holds at least one family, but preferably two or three…people I’ll grow old with, people who will remember the time we lived in a white house on a rocky shore and dared each other to jump in the ocean at the stroke of midnight while reciting a verse from Homer….

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