How Did I End Up a Gypsy?

Astute readers of the blog may know that I’m pretty much addicted to travel. For me, traveling allows me to be more present in the moment, to experience different things, meet different people (whom I have no obligation to be completely personal about things because, well you know me), and see different places.

I came from a family that really didn’t travel. I’m an only child of parents with very limited means. Our sporadic family vacations consisted of going to a campground about an hour from our home for a few nights, or piling in the car to drive to my mom’s sister’s place (read – trailer home) in Indiana. And even those trips weren’t every year or even every other year. Heck, I didn’t stay in a hotel until I was 15 (Days Inn in Niagara Falls in the pre-Internet days when the Niagara Falls Visitor Center guy totally took us for a bunch of rubes and suckered my dad into booking a room on the NY side because the Canadian side was more expensive – it was, in Canadian dollars, which at the time was totally funny money).

So the fact that I spent a great deal of my childhood lying on the floor of the living room with this massive world atlas (a free gift with the purchase of a book-by-the-month encyclopedia set my parent bought me to give me something else to read after I read all of the children’s books in the library by age 5) plotting out journeys to far-flung places quite frankly perplexed my parents. “I’m going to go here someday”, I would say with my chubby little finger pointing to some obscure place on the map of the world. “I’m going to go to the Eiffel Tower someday”, I would randomly announce to my mom when we were in the grocery store and saw the American-style prepackaged loaves of French bread. “Uh huh”, both of my parents would reply to these random outbursts.

To them, traveling to anywhere was just too expensive, a luxury for people who had a salary, not for people who worked hourly wages and have no idea if the plant was going to shut down next week or if the restaurant was going to go under before getting paid. Travel was something other people did, but not us. Even the thought of getting a passport is still something my parents grapple with – “gee, that’s a lot of money and then you still have to get your picture taken…” I’ve tried for years to pay the passport fees as their Christmas present and use fear as the tactic – “You know mom and dad, you don’t have a passport and if something happens to me while I’m traveling, the only people who will be able to get me are the in-laws” and that still hasn’t swayed them!!

So, how did I end up a gypsy, as my parents called me? I got on my first airplane ride when I was 10 and I never looked back. I’ve gone to Europe, to South America, to Central America, and I’m 3 states shy of getting all 50. My list to go-to is still bigger…I get a little giddy just reading travel blogs and guide books to places I have no immediate plans on visiting. Travel is apparently my one and only hobby (well, aside from sporadic blogging) in all shapes and forms – whether actively traveling to just browsing the airfare sales for my home airport for fun.

I read a lot of books about neuroscience (nerd alert) and obviously the travel thing can’t be nurture because this obsession of mine is not present in either of my parents. So is there a genetic component? Maybe it’s on the same chromosome as whatever made me susceptible to skin cancer (also something neither of my parents has)? And honestly, it’s not because I’m an extrovert. And I’m fairly risk-adverse so there’s no thrill from the element of risk you take when you travel.

I’m thinking about all of this because my husband and I have a fairly big trip coming up, and it’s to some of those places that fascinated me as a young girl studying the atlas. I’ll talk more about that in the next post because this one is already getting to be too long!