I've been thinking about all the things I've done and places I've seen. At the age of 18 my world was miniscule. My picture was right next to the word 'naive'. I had been to New York City, and it had terrified me. I felt like the ugly duckling in a swan pond. I saw Washington D.C. on that same trip. It made the pictures I'd seen all my short life real. The following year I got to go to the Montreal World's Fair. That was it. The sum total of my travel experience. All the places I didn't go in those three cities makes my adult self weep, but my teen self didn't even know they existed.
All that traveling was spent in a crowd of 40 teenagers from my local church. We took a tour bus from Oklahoma; sleeping (not really) overnight on the buses. Our accommodations in the three cities was modest with shared rooms. No matter, I considered myself extremely fortunate to have gone to those places since I already knew Tulsa, Oklahoma was a small pond.
Those trips were the result of a woman who possessed a driving force to broaden our horizons beyond Oklahoma. Can you imagine arranging this trip without the benefit of the internet or cell phones? She managed to get everything set up while she was working full time. Of course, as a self-absorbed teenager, I took all of this for granted. It never occurred to me how much effort was involved in the logistics of these trips. And, the cost had to be minimized, since none of us were much beyond lower middle class.
The one thing these trips accomplished was to whet my appetite for new places and the experiences you can have when you travel. Another thing that has crept into my consciousness is how much smaller the world is now than it was in 1968. Traveling to the other side of the world was mind boggling to me at age 18. I couldn't imagine even going to all the places I wanted to see in the United States much less overseas. I thought about going to the East coast for college, but not only did I not have the drive to get there, there was no possible financing.
My father's attitude was there was nothing worth seeing outside of the United States. I was selected as a foreign exchange student from my high school, and he refused to even consider me going out of the country. I'm sure his perceptions were shaped by WWII. He was stationed in England, and his job was running bombing raids over Germany. He'd never been outside of Oklahoma. He was very young, and he found himself in a country which both needed and resented him. My mother wanted a bigger world for me as long as the tether to Tulsa, Oklahoma remained. When Drake and I graduated from college, moving to Houston must have been a big pill for them to swallow.
Now, we really are going to the other side of the world. My 18 year old self would have been terrified, and I probably wouldn't have been 'game' for this even in my 20's. We didn't hit our travel stride until we were in our 30's and by that time we had a small child. However, like my mother, I wanted more for our daughter. When she did her study abroad time, I was thrilled it was around the world in a semester.
Travel makes you question who you are in relation to other people, other cultures, and just every 'other' you can think of. Seeing the manmade wonders of the world up close helps you appreciate not just what they look like, but why they exist. Seeing natural wonders bring out a sense of awe that permeates your entire body. I'm eager to see both the manmade and the natural wonders of 'down under'; Southeast Asia and the Far East. Now, if I can just survive the flights.....
