I’ve been doing a lot of travel-drooling from my kitchen table. I am one of those people who, freed from my “cage,” will want to go everywhere people are once we can joyously gather and communally eat and lightheartedly frolic!
Two of the only promotional-deal email lists I’m voluntarily on are TravelZoo.com and Exoticca.com, and I’m gaping over the offers… $499 per person for a 9-day Costa Rica beach and volcano trip including airfare (I looked deeper into it, and there are some sketchy reviews of the company offering it, but hey, maybe it’s worth it anyway!); $1800 per person for a 9-day Petra journey (I follow Petra, and it’s normally closer to $2,900!); $2100 for a sweeping tour of China, Malaysia, and India for 18 days (you can find deals in normal times going for 9 days on an all-inclusive tour of China for as little as $599, which we almost did a few years ago, but this is twice the time and three countries). So many of the deals out there are refundable or have no change fees in case the virus closes down borders.
I’ve planned a mental trip along the East Coast in my journal, driving from North Carolina to Nova Scotia, stopping at all the most beautiful seaside towns along the way, then cutting westward just below the US/Canada border toward Niagara Falls, then below the Great Lakes, up to Mackinac Island, and down to Illinois to catch Amtrak’s Empire Builder line back to Seattle. A dream for now.
I’ve visited the Amalfi Coast, Capri Island, Cinque Terre, and Lake Como – Rick Steves gave me a primer on all of them. Then I set off on my own info-digging adventures online.
Then we got a major bump up in filmography – we started watching Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy – oh, how my family enjoys a rich, colorful, well-filmed experience. My husband records it on YouTube TV and we flock around the screen to soak it all in. (Stanley prays a lot, as you’ll see – ha!) Here’s the trailer, if you haven’t heard of it yet…
Here’s another one…
We know how fast time passes when you have kids, and we have two summers left with our 15-year-old. Several years ago, while contemplating a trip to a far-off island I had always dreamed of visiting, our neighbor happened to walk by. We started chatting. She was planning a trip too, to the Galapagos Islands with her relatives. “Why do you feel funny about planning a trip to this island, Edee?”
“Well, there are refugees and starving people, and towns with no access to clean water. Should I even be imagining the luxury of visiting a remote island for a vacation?”
“Edee,” she said firmly, “are the four of you all able to go?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing keeping you?”
“No.”
“Go. If you’re all able to go, take advantage of the timing. Later in life, there will be things that keep you from making memories like that. Your kids will be in college. There will be a family illness and someone to care for. Your budget won’t be the same in some seasons. There will be other things that can get in the way. If you have the opportunity to make it happen right now, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. Later may not happen. I know that this Galapagos trip is a trip of a lifetime for me and my family. There’s no other time in our lives when we could have done it, and who knows if we could ever all get the chance to do it in the future together.”
My neighbor’s words were almost prophetic now that I think back on them.
We have been in a long, drawn-out pandemic season for over a year. Who knows how long it will last. Who knows if strains will keep it going into perpetuity, at least for the remainder of our children’s childhoods.
I always had it in the back of my mind that when our kids were 10 and 15, I’d feel okay about going off in the world for an extended service trip together, like living, schooling, and working on the Mercy Ship for a year. The year they turned 10 and 15 was 2020. The year of isolation. No school at school, no community gatherings, no visiting relatives in Texas.
Now I feel very mindful of the fact that two summers will fly by. Not that it’s a necessity to travel anywhere. I just always thought that I’d expand the minds and experiences of our kids to the point that once they were old enough, we’d go out into the broader world. We’d give them (and ourselves) an extended perspective we couldn’t get by staying at home, on Orcas Island, on the West Coast, in the United States.
In the meantime, I’ve always loved cultures and geography, even the simple act of looking at maps. I was doing a geography coloring book for awhile, but it was going so slowly. I really wanted to learn my countries faster. Then our older son came home from school and showed me a website called Seterra Geography Games that his teacher, Mr. Rivera, was using for them. Oh my goodness! How fun this is to me! It shows you a map of a continent’s countries and starts a timer. It tells you to click on each country that pops up by your cursor, and wow! You learn your countries quickly by doing this several times! I have learned the countries in all of the continents except Africa now – one more continent to go!
If you’re finding a yearning to be around others, experience cultures, be immersed in foreign loveliness, and enlighten your senses with geographical change, you’re not alone! If you’re planning some things in your mind hoping that they may somehow work out in reality in the near-ish future and want to look at COVID rates in all of the countries of the world, this is a great site that updates every day.
If there’s any chance with these refundable fees and vaccines that we could do a trip in a little window of safety, I want to be prepared. If we can’t, at least it gives me something exciting to dream about.
