The Further Adventures of Lauren - An Introduction

I’ve been writing this blog for seventeen years now, and before this one I had another that I kept up for a bit over five years. There was a gap of about four years in between them, and the first one no longer exists on the internet though I have a local copy for myself because of course I do. I’ve been doing this for a while.

And the great lesson you get from doing this for that long is simple. A blog is about the blogger.

All of this is about me. These are my stories. I don’t get to tell other people’s stories because those are their stories, not mine. When I do tell other people’s stories it’s always about my reaction to their stories rather than the stories themselves. I’ve never considered myself a particularly egotistical person, but I have to admit that after a quarter century of blogging there is a case to be made that I might be wrong about that.

But in addition to being a blogger, I’m also an archivist. I am, not surprisingly, the family historian, in more ways than simply being a professional historian who has a family. I save things. I write things down. And over the years both Oliver and Lauren have told me that they have used this blog as a reference when trying to remember things we did together or prove to other people that the stories they’re telling actually happened. I am the repository of family stories, and one of the main reasons I started this blog (and the earlier one as well) was simply to write those stories down – to have a place where we could go to remember.

And it would be a shame to lose good stories just because I wasn’t there.

Lauren had a rather grand adventure this summer, one that deserves to be recorded and remembered, and she has graciously given me permission to write about it here. I’ve sent her drafts to look at, because it is in the end her story to tell and I should get it right by her, and I’m presenting it here with permission because that matters when you tell the stories of others.

How this adventure came about was in some ways pretty straightforward.

Lauren graduated from Main Campus University in May knowing that she would be returning there for another year. She’d been admitted to a 4+1 Masters Degree program while she was an undergraduate and had been taking graduate-level courses for most of her senior year, so this coming May we will once again be returning to the campus for a graduation and you can’t have too many of those, I say. Next summer she will either be on the job market (a perilous thing these days) or starting a new career, and in either event she will have precious little time for adventuring for a while once that happens. So if she were going to have adventures, this summer would be it.

One of the things that Lauren has done pretty much right from the beginning is travel. She took her first flight when she was five months old, going to Philadelphia to be christened at my old church. Her first international trip was a visit to the UK and Sweden when she was all of twenty months old, and while she doesn’t remember much about that trip, she doesn’t really have to. For one thing, I’ve got the stories and the photos to share. And for another, the main things about it were to have a good time when she was there and to plant the idea that good things happen when you go somewhere.

That seed has well and truly blossomed. We’ve traveled together, all over the US and to eight different countries in Europe as well as to Canada, and since then she’s been to countries and states I’ve never been to and places in Canada I’ll likely never see. She lived in Germany for eight months until the pandemic brought that to a halt. She and her friend Arden spent a week in Guatemala a couple summers ago and then earlier this year another week in Madrid, where Arden was living at the time, with a side trip to Malta because once you’re in Europe traveling elsewhere is cheap and easy.

She is, as she pointed out to me this spring, a more experienced traveler than I am. This was true even before this summer’s adventure, and it has only gotten more so since then.

For her graduation present, Lauren did not ask us for things. Instead, she asked for travel. We said we’d pay for her flight out of the US and her flight back to the US, and from there she was free to plan her summer. After a year of bartending she had some money saved up, and the simple fact is that once you get outside of the US pretty much everything gets a lot cheaper – especially if you are willing to stay in hostels and fly on the local airlines. We did spring for travel insurance because we’re parents and it was worth it to us to have that guarantee, and we ended up taking care of some of the bureaucracy here at home. I made sure that our credit union wouldn’t cancel her debit card once charges came rolling in from distant points, for example, and Kim extended the roaming plan on her phone in case she needed to make emergency phone calls to someone who wasn’t on WhatsApp – a hard-learned lesson from my sad experience in Florence. But even so, she bought her own eSim cards and worked with wifi and data for the trip, and pretty much everything else was on her.

It was an ambitious plan when all was said and done, one that covered five countries spread out across the globe, with three more if you included layovers. Within that she would be visiting ten different cities or regions and the whole thing was originally scheduled to last eight weeks or so.

You never really stop worrying about your child no matter how much of an adult they become, and we insisted that every day she send some proof of life, even it if was not aimed directly at us – a WhatsApp message, an Instagram post, something to let us know she was still out there enjoying the world, and it has to be said that she kept her end of that. Every so often we’d even get phone calls from far off and exotic places, and three cheers for modern telecommunications I say.

In the end the plan changed, as plans often do, and she visited six countries plus the three layovers, including fourteen different cities or regions, and the trip lasted ten and a half weeks all told. She literally went around the world – she left Chicago heading east and came back from the west. Some of this she did with old friends, some she did with new friends, and some she did on her own.

And I am immensely proud that she pulled all this off.

It didn’t always go smoothly, but these things never do. There were bumps, changes on the fly, and occasional crises. But she handled them all and came back full of stories.

“Everything returns,” said Louise Glück, “but what returns is not what went away.” You can’t travel like that and not be changed, and I am looking forward to seeing where she goes from here.