hedda62 | January posting meme: travel (Reply)

brewsternorth wanted me to talk about travel, and name a place I'd like to go someday. Well, ha, fancy asking me to pick a place. Lemme just go on about travel in general for a while and we'll see what happens.

Travel and I have a complicated relationship. If it were up to me alone, I'd spend my life never going anywhere and then regretting it, so it's good that I'm married to someone who loves to travel and that I have family and friends all over the place. I do actually enjoy being in new places, once I'm there, but I hate deciding where to go (on the small scale. My husband is worse on the large scale; we have all these conversations where he says "and while we're in Paris we might as well go to Prague" and then I chime in with "and then it's not far to Delhi and we should take in Cape Town while we're at it" just to emphasize the absurdity of the see-everything-in-five-days optimism. It's the only time I get to be the pessimist, really). And there's making finicky arrangements, and worrying about not speaking the language, and then there are the horrors of air travel and the near-inevitable migraine that swallows the first day after arrival (though that's been better of late). And there's the guilt over the idea that foreign travel is Broadening, but then again there's still much of the U.S. I haven't seen (though I've seen a fair amount), and it's certainly easier to go places where English is spoken and the hotels are predictable, but oh I am a terrible person for thinking that. And I really should speak five languages and I don't.

I've also had too many conversations with people who live in the U.K. (or in continental Europe) who don't quite understand how very much farther and more expensive it is for Americans to travel to Europe, so why haven't we insular savages been there or to the other parts of the world adjacent to it, and I had a running discussion with my English neighbor who'd boast over regularly taking his kids abroad while they were growing up, while we were just going places in the States, and I'd think "you're taking them to visit their relatives, and so are we" (except we also went to many places we didn't have relatives, and their kids have had to wait till adulthood to see their own country). (And speaking of kids, when you have a family of four it's a lot more costly to go places than it is just to take yourself. We're lucky to have the money, but we don't have that much money. And there's the tyranny of the school schedule. Ah, what a revelation it is to be an empty-nester and be able to go places in May and September!)

Then there is the weird writer's guilt over not having visited all the places I've written about (though at least there's the loophole of not actually being able to travel to, say, 17th-century Amsterdam). Probably those I've missed should have been first on my list. Though, you know, I didn't get a research budget.

So, as I said, complicated. That said, hey, I'd like to travel everywhere. You could probably not name a place I wouldn't be interested in going to, as long as it's not currently being bombed. I hope I will get to go to a few of those many places before I die. I'm hoping for Italy next fall, if P. gets to do his semester abroad there. (He's going to Ghana in May, but I don't get to piggyback on that.) On the other hand, it seems we're always going somewhere and saying how much we love it and that we'll definitely come back someday, and we never do, so… I'd like to go back to some places I've already been, too. I'd especially like to go back to that little hotel-of-cabins on Caye Caulker in Belize, and hang out by the shore and eat great food while barefoot and go kayaking. I want to go to Yellowstone again, and stay at Chico Hot Springs, and hike in Zion for more than a couple of hours (short version: we didn't care to spend Easter Sunday in Las Vegas. I do not want to go back to Las Vegas). I want to see much more of Peru than I've already seen (do I want to go to Machu Picchu again, or is one transcendent experience enough? This is a question worth debate). I want to go to Charlottesville and Charleston enough times to feel really familiar with their geography, and ditto San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area even though I've started to map that pretty well in my head. And last year's trip up the northern California coast was lovely (and the Oregon coast! also wonderful! and the Olympic Peninsula!). I need to go back to Maine, because it's part of my DNA. I want to climb Snowdon again, and trudge back up to Surprise Lake in the Tetons (and not permanently injure my knee this time). And so forth. I've been so lucky to get to see what I've seen, but sometimes once is not enough to have really been there.

On the other hand, Tahiti…