More Travel Nostalgia

I've written about travel before the era of the Interstates and the cookie-cutter food and motel chains before, in dealing with the impact a 1958 trip throughout the West, when I was 10 and a half, had on me.

No need to repeat what I've said there. But even on a short excursion down to Quantico today we got into a discussion of places Sarah still needs to see. She hasn't seen New York. Or even Philadelphia. Of course, I didn't see these places till I was in college, but I grew up in the Midwest. Sarah had traveled farther at the age of 15 months than I ever did until I was a mature adult, but of course she didn't remember it. I well recall standing in the aisle with her as we approached the coast of California on the Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles: I saw the coastline suddenly in view through the window and sat her in the seat and said, "Sarah, that's your new country, your first view of your new country." She pointed straight up at the reading light, which was on, and burbled. She didn't look out the window at all: the light was prettier than the California coast. Not long after that, she pulled my glasses out of my pocket and dropped them on the floor. This knocked a lens out, which eventually, I lost, and had to buy a new set of progressive lenses for about $600. So don't try to be overly romantic about showing a baby the California coast.

But it's different now. She may pretend boredom because it's someplace Dad and Mom want her to see, but often she becomes engaged once she gets there. She's a fan of the movie "National Treasure," a rather improbable story but one filmed in real historic sites, and it helped get her to the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, and will, I think, help when we get to Philadelphia and New York.

All of which reminds me that there was a time I hadn't been to any of those places. I didn't cross the Mississippi till sometime around (I think) 1961 when we took a trip to St. Louis and decided to go on to Springfield, Illinois. Out of that came a lifelong fascination with Lincoln, and at least indirectly my involvement in genealogy (I'll tell that story separately), but even so I never got east of Springfield, Illinois, until I went to college.

That sounds strange today, when everybody travels so much. I committed to four years of college in a city I'd never visited. I didn't do interviews at Georgetown, and didn't visit the campus. Similarly. when in 1972 I set out for Cairo for a year, in a country where the US had no diplomatic relations at the time, my only foreign travel had been to Montreal and a couple of other Canadian locales, and one Mexican border town. Okay, let's go live in the third world without a US Embassy.

Looking back, it seems strange, maybe even a little brave, though I survived and flourished, obviously. But it is also a reminder of how things change. Sarah's world is different. The Internet makes it so much easier to know the rest of the world, to talk to people there, to learn.

More on this anon. It's too late to keep going right now. But I want to talk more about travel in my youth and in Sarah's.