Europe 24 - People Who Travel

I have apparently become one of those People Who Travel.

I’m not entirely sure how this happened.

It really wasn’t part of my upbringing. I grew up in and around Philadelphia and like all good Philadelphians we had our summer trip down the Jersey shore, which happened in the first week of August and was timed to the shut-down week at my dad’s company when the factory would retool. The company had one other location – in Wisconsin, ironically enough – and their shut-down week was timed to the start of deer hunting season. I understand this much better now. But for us shut-down was August and that was beach time.

By the time I graduated college – in a ceremony which took place about half a block from where I was born – I had expanded my geographic range south to Williamsburg VA and north to Hartford CT. A year or so later I moved to Pittsburgh, which felt like the far west to me at the time.

Sometimes you look back on yourself and just shake your head.

The first time I got on an airplane I was 24. It was a tiny little commuter plane that took me from Philadelphia to NYC, where I had six hours at the airport to consider how that went before I got on a different (much larger) plane to visit my friend Julia in the UK. It would be fourteen years before I left the US again after that.

Now, traveling is one of the Things We Do.

It’s basically our one extravagance. We’ve lived in the same house for nearly thirty years now and we paid it off right before the pandemic. We have no car payments anymore – haven’t for years. None of us has expensive taste in clothing, food, or gadgetry. We like stuff as much as the next person – ascetics we are not – but it’s not a prime motivator in our lives. But we like to go places and visit people and see things, and that we’re willing to devote resources to doing.

We’ve been to much of the US, a big and fascinating country and one that requires very little advance planning to see if you’re already here. Oliver and Lauren have had passports since before they were in kindergarten, and we’ve been abroad more times than I ever thought I would when I was younger (admittedly a low bar). When we travel we try to do some of the tourist things (being tourists, after all) and some of the more prosaic things as well – daily life is fascinating when you can step back and see it anew. I love going to grocery stores and riding the bus or tram in new places, for example, because you get a better sense of how people live that way.

Familiar and normal are different things. Until you go somewhere new you’ll never really understand that.

Last year we went on our BFT23, all four of us. I wasn’t sure if that would be the last of the family trips before Oliver and Lauren hived off into their own lives, but we treated it as if it might be and just had a lovely time of it.

And then we were invited back.

Last year when we were in Ruoti, the hilltop town in Basilicata where my great-grandparents were born, we met Felice, who it turned out was working on a project about the emigres from Ruoti and their descendants. In fact, there would be an entire festival devoted to the emigres in early August 2024 and would we like to come back and take part?

And we thought about that. Perhaps too long, because by the time we decided that yes, in fact, we would like to come back and take part the rooms at the town’s B&B were full. We ended up in the next town over, which is a long story for a future post. But we were going, and from there it spiraled out into a full-fledged Trip, one that would see us not only return to Italy but also visit two new countries as well.

Lauren couldn’t come this time – she had commitments here in Wisconsin this summer – so it was just me, Kim, and Oliver. To make up for this Lauren and her friend Arden planned a trip of their own, which will be starting in just a few days. One of the things I love about our family is that we are all People Who Travel now. It’s what we do. I will look forward to hearing her stories when she comes back, and perhaps next time we can all travel together again.

We had a wonderful time on our trip and much of the posting here for a while will likely be about that, if only so I can preserve my own memories. If you’re someone who doesn’t like reading about other people’s travels you may want to skip out for a while. I’ll talk about other things again soon enough.

I am not an adventurous person. I have adventures anyway, mostly because I am surrounded by adventurous people and I am willing to be uncomfortable and I say yes even when I’m not sure about it at all. It’s worth it in the end. It’s always worth it in the end.

It’s good to go. It’s good to come home. It’s good venture out to the places and meet the people and do the things and come back with the stories to tell even if you only tell them to each other.

So we travel.