What’s the Perfect Trip?
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Lee and I are leaving the US today, after three crazy-busy weeks. I’m looking forward to a bit of downtime. Our youngest just embarked on their own nomad adventure—first stop, Mexico City—so we’re going to meet up there for a couple of weeks.
What’s the Perfect Trip?
Yesterday, Lee and I found a laundromat on a side street in downtown Istanbul, and settled in to get our laundry done. We met a British couple who were on the last leg of a carefully planned 3-month trip around the world, and an American dad who was on a two-month, flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants trip with his family, planning each destination as they went, based on ticket prices. He and his pregnant wife are traveling with four kids, ages ten, eight, six, and one. He asked where we thought they should go next, so we gave him some ideas. I was pretty impressed that they were so comfortable dragging four kids through a bunch of foreign countries—it sounded way harder than I ever had the patience for, but it definitely hit me in my parenting-values sweet spot.
When our kids were in elementary school, I knew a school mom whose kid was really into ice hockey. The dad played, and the kid was on a very competitive travel team. The whole family loved ice hockey. One year, the travel team was invited to a tournament somewhere in Europe—maybe Slovakia, or Croatia—I can’t remember where. I thought it sounded like a great excuse for a trip. But I remember talking to the mom about it, and she was adamant that they wouldn’t be going, because she thought her ten-year-old was too young to remember a big trip.
I was really bothered by that. We were lucky enough to be able to travel a fair amount with our kids when they were young, both in the US and abroad. What we wanted from those vacations was not for them to remember the specifics of the places we visited. We wanted them to internalize the knowledge that no one of us is the center of the universe. We felt strongly that travel is the single best way to learn that the way they grew up isn’t the only way children grow up. There’s another way of life, other values, other world views.
One year, we were in the Caribbean at Christmas, and we hired a driver for the day. We were tooling along on a quiet little back road. Next to a humble cinder-block house, we saw a cow tied up under a makeshift shelter. The driver pointed, and offhandedly joked that it was Christmas dinner. Sure enough, when we drove back by that afternoon, the cow had been butchered, and the meat was hanging there in the shelter. Someone had worked hard to provide their family with a special holiday meal. For about two seconds, I struggled with what to say to our children, who had never really seen that kind of hand-to-mouth reality in action. Then I went with the truth: everybody has to eat. If you’re born on an arid island in the middle of the ocean, you might not have a lot of choices.
We loved traveling together as a family, and we planned those trips very carefully, choosing destinations that suited the interests and capabilities of our particular offspring. In 2021, Lee and I were in Florence in midsummer—you couldn’t have paid me to take my kids there when they were young, especially not in summer. The kids I saw being dragged through the great museums of Renaissance history and art looked, without exception, miserable. I was perfectly capable of making my two miserable at the National Gallery in Washington, no trans-Atlantic flight required.
Right after 9/11, I took Toby to London for a week. He was seven years old, and still a little feral. I’m still grateful to my friend Lisa, who went with us and helped with the wrangling. It took both of us to manage him, especially given the tension in the air that September. But he was obsessed with knights in armor, and military history, and ancient weaponry. It was the perfect trip for that child, at that point in his life. Does he remember the details about our time in London? Probably not. But does he have a broader view of the world and all its people today? Absolutely.
Monuments and museums are some of my favorite things in the world, but the real value of travel, in my opinion, is in seeing the infinite range of human experience, and learning to treasure that beauty.
Take care,
Lisa
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