I have friends who have never traveled outside North America.
I have a 9-year-old grandson who traveled completely around the world before his first birthday.
There’s something really strange about that. My grandson Lexington was born in Seattle and has lived in Indonesia, Jamaica and Guatemala in addition to a couple of short stints in Virginia. He traveled from Seattle to Indonesia to Spain to Georgia and back to Seattle before he was 10 months old. He’ll be living in northern Africa by late summer.
My friend has lived in the same apartment in Pasadena, California, going on 33 years.
I’m somewhere in between. I was 26 before I made it out of North America, but in the time since then I’ve been to Canada, Austria, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Greece, French Polynesia, South Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Jamaica and Guatemala.
There are still places in the world I would like to see, and I might make it to some of them. Scotland, for example, and maybe Egypt. But the ones at the top of my list — Australia and New Zealand — are probably not feasible at my age.
I’ve been places, places enough for a lifetime of memories. I’ve stood on the Great Wall of China and I’ve seen the cave paintings at Lascaux, France. I would still like to see the Pyramids and the Grand Canyon, and I would purely love to ride the Empire Builder train from Chicago to Seattle.
The pyramids, especially. I’ve been told that between the stupendous amount of work required and the historical era in which they were built, they might just be the most amazing creation of man. When we visit my daughter and her family in Tunisia, we’ll be in the same general part of the world. It’s only a three-hour flight from Tunis to Cairo.
My late friend Tom Kensler, who grew up all over as an Air Force brat and then continued traveling when he had the opportunity as an adult. Some years back I asked readers to submit their opinions on the basic truths of life. Tom’s was short and to the point.
“Travel broadens you.”
I wrote before about a young man I met in Cooperstown, N.Y., four years ago. He was my waiter in a Pizza Hut and he was impressed that my wife and I had driven all the way from Georgia to see the Baseball Hall of Fame. Our trip had covered more than a thousand miles. He told me he had never been farther from home than Albany, 78 miles away.
But he didn’t intend to be one of those people who never sees the world. He told me when he finished school, he wanted to get a job teaching English to students in Japan.
My wife and I were still in the early part of our trip. We went on to Boston, New York City and the Amish Country in Pennsylvania before returning home to Georgia. I think it wound up being 2,400 miles or so.
It was probably the last big car trip we’ll take. We’re hopeful we have at least one big air trip in us. We’d like to make that trip to Tunisia and then go from there to Egypt and see the Pyramids.
My parents traveled the world till their late 70s when my dad’s health turned bad. I hope we can do at least a few short trips to places in the U.S. we’ve never seen.
It’s a better way to spend the declining years than just sitting at home.
If travel broadens you, there is an opposite.
Not traveling narrows you.