Are we having fun yet?! Photo: GraceFamily
Contributor Steven Roll reflects on travel as a kid…and travel as the parent of a kid.
As our camper rounded a curve on a mountain roadway somewhere in the U.S. Rockies, my parents called back to me to look at the snow-capped peak that had come into view. The white mountain top on that summer day must have been a captivating sight.
But it paled in comparison to the installment of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy I was reading. “Cool,” I shouted over the din of rattling pots and pans as I tried to focus on a paragraph that would reveal Frodo’s fate.
“As an adult, I’ve developed a decidedly different attitude about travel than my parents.”
I was 11 or 12 years old and we were making our annual trip from New York to California. During the months my brother and I were in school, my parents rented a cottage with a stunning view of Long Island’s Hempstead Harbor. When summer arrived, the landlord moved back into the house and we hit the road. This arrangement worked for my parents because they were both professors and classes didn’t start again until after Labor Day.
During the three or four years we lived this way, we visited nearly every state in the U.S. and all the provinces in Canada. We saw many of the major tourist attractions in both countries.
Forced Exile
Photo: Amir Fathi
But much of this was probably wasted on me. Instead of looking at our annual trips as an adventure, I saw them as periods of forced exile from time spent playing with neighborhood friends. This semi-nomadic lifestyle wasn’t my idea. I had to go along with it because I was a kid.
As an adult, I’ve developed a decidedly different attitude about travel than my parents. For one thing, I’ve sworn off driving anywhere in a camper. Much to my wife’s chagrin, the idea of visiting most places within U.S. seems mundane.
I’ve always felt guilty about my ambivalence toward my childhood travel experiences. But that’s begun to abate now that I have kids of my own. It seems almost certain they’ll reject many of the core elements of my travel philosophy.
This evolutionary process reminds me of the book The Corrections, the 2001 critically acclaimed novel that depicts the lives of three siblings who are bent on living an entirely different life than that of their parents. In doing so, they each make an opposite set of choices with even more disastrous consequences.
Travel Philosophy
Like the siblings in The Corrections, my parent’s attitude about travel has always been a foil for my own, with both good and bad results.
During my college years and young adulthood, I shunned the idea of traveling almost anywhere. I took comfort in the predictable routine that comes with staying at home. When I did go somewhere, it was usually a short trip to the beach or a visit to a friend’s house a few states away. For most of this period I focused on my career and young children. But looking back, I regret the missed opportunities, especially when I was in college.
Now that I’ve reached my 40s, I’m more interested in traveling. This is partly because it’s easier. My kids are older and my wife and I are more settled in our careers. In the past few years, we’ve taken two great trips to Costa Rica and Mexico.
Our kids will likely have their own set of “corrections.”
The Next Generation
Photo: Beard Papa
Before our trip to Mexico a few weeks ago, our eight-year old son worried about whether it would be safe and fretted about missing two swim meets. Our thirteen-year old daughter seemed excited about going to the beach in Puerto Vallarta, but was less enthusiastic about spending time in landlocked Guadalajara.
As expected, they complained the most while visiting the plazas, churches, and museums in Guadalajara. Our son liked the “Mexican rodeo” we saw there, but our daughter–an avid horse lover–could have done without it. They both liked spending time on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. But they were far less enthusiastic during our evening walks into town.
A few days after returning home, I overheard each of them telling their grandparents how much fun they had throughout the whole trip.
Whether they realize it or not, my kids are in the process of developing their own travel philosophies. For better or worse, what they come up with will likely be decidedly different from their parents’.
Community Connection:
If you’re a new parent considering traveling with your infant for the first time, read some knowing advice in “Backpacking After Baby.”
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8 Comments... join the discussion!
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Great post! Who knows what our kids are going to be saying or thinking when they get older. I know I’m constantly dealing with my own corrections from my parents, but as much as we hate to admit it, we carry a lot of what they did and taught us.
My son is still young enough to not voice his opinion about his mom dragging him all over the place, I’ll see when he hits the teens, yikes!
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Very interesting. I was the same as a kid–quietly enduring the U.S. roadtrips and even a summer trip to Europe, wishing I was back home with my friends. However, I haven’t found that I’ve developed opposite takes on travel now that I’m older. Or maybe I have, but I still enjoy U.S. roadtrips and summers in Europe
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Steven! It’s great to see you on Matador. I think this is a great post. It’s interesting to think about how our parents have influenced the way we travel and think about travel. I remember our old, used van with duct tape on the fender, and truckin’ it across the country to the Rocky Mountains, or up the East Coast to Maine. We always left at 4 or 5 in the morning to get a head start, and I remember staying up all night with the anticipation of hitting the road and being off on an adventure. Even though we never went anywhere “exotic” (although to be honest, even as a kid I found Abilene, Kansas bizarre and fascinating) the thrill of being on the road probably had an influence on the super nomadic lifestyle I live now. If/when I have a child, he/she will definitely be riding in the backs of trucks across Laos. Now, whether he/she will grow up with major corrections after that, who knows….
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Funny, I had the exact opposite experience…. I loved our three-week long roadtrips, although there was a period where I was embarassed by our slightly funky, green camper van. We went all over the U.S. and Canada, and those are some of my favorite childhood memories!
Maybe because we did this every year since I was 9 months (!) old, it was just something we always did–it never occurred to me to be upset about not seeing my friends for a couple of weeks.
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Thanks for all of those great comments.
@Rob: I agree with you that many times trips take on a whole new dimension when looking back on it. Also, it’s interesting to observe my kids talking about their travel experiences with their grandparents because there’s no baggage there. Just pure pleasure in sharing new experiences.
@Marina: I agree that there’s much to learn from our parents’ experiences. In my case, much of it was good. That should have merited a sentence or two in my post. Maybe I’ll just write about that in the next one. It sounds like you’ve had a lot of travel experiences, so your son will have a solid base to draw lessons from.
@Hal: I find I actually enjoy road trips more as an adult. Places that I kind of took for granted as a kid, like L.A., seem really special now after living so long in the east. How many places are there where you can go hike a canyon of swim in the ocean without even leaving the city?
@Sarah It’s great to hear from you. Hope all is well. There’s no question that you have the travel bug. You’re the first person I’ve known whose moved from Oaxaca to Japan. I think people go through different phases when it comes to traveling. I’ll keep checking your blog (huevosalamexicana.com) to see the next “place” (geographically and mentally) that your travels take you.
@Renee I’m glad you liked it. I think it’s easy to take things that are given to us for granted. It looks like you’re an exception to that rule. If my parents never traveled when I was a kid, I’d probably spend my life taking trips everywhere and and blogging about that. ; )
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This is a great observation, Steve. Speaking as someone who never traveled at all as a child, I wish my folks had had a travel philosophy. But they simply couldn’t afford vacations, at least not until my mother started selling cosmetics when I was in high school. Then she took some of us with her to the conferences—and for me, at 16, it was a thrilling trip to Montreal.
The kids might not seem too excited while it’s happening, but it makes an impact.
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Great piece. It’s funny how we can also take different memories of the same trips. Every year we used to load up our tiny car and take the ferry across to France, usually taking the back roads rather than the autoroutes which my dad hated driving on. I loved those journeys, even the little things like the great playgrounds at each stopping point beside the road. My brother on the other hand hated the car journeys but enjoyed the final destinations. These days I have permanently itchy feet and he rarely leaves the country.
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