On the Road to Madrid, 1958

     This week I’ve been to London, Paris, Japan, Dubai, Alaska, and Glacier National Park.  Fabulous trips, all!  I have visited museums, shrines, cathedrals, historic pubs, and cutting-edge restaurants.  I’ve had a grand time with friends and with folks I’ve never met – all thanks to the generosity of those who share their photographs on Facebook.
     It’s not that I ever thought I’d become an armchair traveler, and it’s not that my traveling days are over.  It’s just that my priorities have changed for the time being.  It seems more important to keep propping up the family house.  It’s a responsibility that I liken to having a kid perpetually in college.  Hopefully ‘graduation,’ or in our case structural stability, will occur before we are too old to do more trekking.
     There was a time that I spent every other summer abroad.  But perhaps the most memorable was my first trip in 1958, when my son was just a toddler.  We sailed out of Manhattan on the Ryndam on January 3rd, disembarked at LaHavre six days later, and spent the next twelve months traveling on the then possible ‘five dollars a day.’  Looking back, some of my experiences that year seem almost surreal. 
     In May we listened as a million forbidden car horns in Paris tapped out dot dash dot dot dot, “de-Gaulle-au-pou-voir,” as Charles deGaulle came to power.  I remember driving through East Germany and into Berlin later that same year, feeling nervous as I saw the gun emplacements on either side of the road and fearing that we would need to stop, though the Russian soldier at the border had made very clear that it was prohibited.
     We saw the glory of Stonehenge in the days before it was barricaded and before there was an entrance fee.  We crossed London Bridge when it really was “London Bridge Is Falling Down” – before it was sold and reconstructed at Lake Havasu City in Arizona.  And once while we were in Gibralter, I was offered a job (as a cook!  YIKES!) aboard Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso.
     I don’t know that travel broadened me, as they say it is supposed to, but it certainly gave me enough memories to carry me through these house-propping years.  Meanwhile, traveling vicariously with my Facebook friends is a wonderful and welcome substitute.  It’s way better than watching travel shows on TV because, when you actually know the travelers, you feel like a silent partner in their adventures. I highly recommend it to anyone who might be place-bound when they’d rather be on the road.