When you live in a big country, it’s not all that shocking if you never go anywhere else.
But when you have other countries just across the northern or southern borders, it is sort of surprising that 40 percent of Americans have never traveled outside the United States.
Indeed, 11 percent have never traveled outside the state where they were born.
As of a 2019 marketing survey, more than half of Americans have traveled to fewer than 10 states and roughly the same number have never had a passport. That second number was actually much lower until the government started requiring passports to travel to Canada or Mexico.
My two closest lifelong friends aren’t world travelers. One has never been outside the U.S., and the other hasn’t traveled more than 50 miles north or south of the border. My children make up for that. My son has traveled to every continent except Antarctica and my daughter has lived in Africa (twice), Asia, Indonesia, the Caribbean and Central America as a foreign service officer.
Except for a trip to Montreal and Quebec City in 1967, I had never traveled outside the country until 1976. That was when my first wife and I moved to Wien for two years, and during that time, we visited West Germany, Italy, France, England and Switzerland in addition to living in Austria.
Austria from 1976-78 was both the best and worst of times. On the one hand, it was definitely a broadening experience to live outside the U.S., while on the other it was the time when my first marriage began to disintegrate.
Beginning in 1992 with my second marriage, I’ve traveled to seven more countries — the Netherlands, Greece, South Korea, China, Jamaica, Guatemala and French Polynesia. I’ve made multiple trips to France and two more trips to England.
If there’s an irony in all this, it’s that even though I was born in San Diego and lived more than 20 years in Los Angeles as an adult, I never made it across the border into Mexico. I made it within a mile of the border when I spent 10 weeks in Texas in 2010, but there were warnings that it was dangerous for Americans to cross into Mexico because of the drug wars.
If I could live in one country other than my native land, it would probably be France. With a French-born wife and two French-born children, I have a strong emotional connection to La Belle France. I haven’t been there since 2009, but some of the loveliest things I have seen in this world are there.
Most Americans have never been to Europe, and they fall for the propaganda that we somehow have better lives and more freedom than Western Europeans, and they would be surprised at how much less stressful life is there. Health insurance not tied to their jobs, retirement insurance that pretty well guarantees a decent old age and at least four weeks paid vacation a year.
This would be a very different country if more people actually had the chance to see how other people live. In the second half of their lives, my parents became world travelers, and it was when they saw the world, they realized that while the U.S. was nice, it wasn’t necessarily the nicest place to live.
Counting my native land, I have visited 14 countries. The iffiest one is Switzerland. All I really did there was change planes in Zurich in 1976.
I’m better on the U.S. I’ve been to 46 of the 50 states, missing at this point only Alaska, Arkansas, Mississippi and Wisconsin.
So I may not be a world traveler like my kids.
But I’ve traveled more than my average countryman.
That’s good enough for me.