Why I Continue To Travel

The university in Sfax, Tunisia. I can't imagine living with that sky every day.

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“Please be careful.” A friend’s Facebook message popped up on my computer as I sat in my Dijon apartment eating lunch and reading about the terrorist attack that had just happened in Brussels. I remember last November when I was the one doing the checking with friends scattered throughout Paris while I sat safe at home in St. Louis, having left an extended stay in France only a week before the tragedy.

Now it’s just a few days before I leave Europe again and head home. It’s not fear over terrorism that occupies my mind. Not in week when the street markets are bursting with spring bouquets for sale. For this traveler, it comes down to the most pedestrian things like “Will a terrorist threat shut down public transport in Paris?” or “How will this affect my flight?” or “Will it rain the whole time I’m in Paris. After all – April?”

As I watched the news reports on France24, an urge welled up to call my husband on Skype and talk to him about mundane household affairs. I can’t say it was fear. My apartment was safe and warm. There was soup de courgette cooking on the stove. The sun had been out all week. These were not signs of imminent danger. Yet my sense of security wavered by a small increment.

When the terrorist attacks happened in Paris last fall, many people in the U.S. cancelled their overseas travel plans. I was thinking ahead to my next trip. After the tragedy of 9/11 in New York made many want to stay close to home, I bought plane tickets to take my children to London. For a week we explored a country that had survived Roman invasions and German bombardments. We experienced the world. I fed their love of travel.

 Dougga in a verdant valley of Tunisia, an isolated ancient Roman town

and UNESCO world heritage site

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My daughter crosses oceans frequently for work at a time when a plane seems to fall out of the sky at least every month. But she’s young and adventurous and sees amazing opportunities to shape her life. And as her mother I worry. Because that’s what mothers do. But I also worry about my son whose job requires a long commute in highway traffic right in our own hometown. Isn’t he playing the odds – the more miles traveled the more likely to be in a crash? It’s a mother’s job to worry. Yes, I admit it. Sometimes I make up reasons to text him to make sure he’s alive since he’s busy with two jobs and friends and doesn’t call enough.

On Good Friday evening as I arrived at l’Eglise Notre-Dame de Dijon, two armed soldiers were standing on the steps outside. The battle between love/hope and power/hate rages on. But in the dim light of the sanctuary the music of Gregorian chants rose a couple of hundred feet into the vaulted arches and floated over the crowd as the congregation followed the choir past the multitude of stone columns, stopping at different stations in the church to listen to the songs of love and sacrifice that had been heard there for 800 years. By the time the service was over, it was fairly easy to believe "Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est" -- Where charity and love is, there also is God.

The world can be a dangerous place whether I stay where I was born or strike out on unfamiliar roads. I’ve met more wonderful people and had more enriching experiences on my trips than I’ve encountered bad ones. As I get older I feel a sense of urgency to see more of the world before I can’t any more. Travel reminds me that I’m not always in charge. And I’m ok with that. It reminds me that my way of doing things is not the only or best way. It forces me outside of my comfort zone, which is scary and good (can anyone say “Atlanta highways”?). It makes me feel at home in the world, not just my own neighborhood.

All of this is to say that I will keep on traveling. There is more beauty and joy out there than danger. I hope you feel the same.

I'm always wondering what's behind a closed door . . .

. . . Or around the next bend

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Since I’ve been out of touch for longer than I had intended, let’s reconnect by you telling me the most interesting or life-affecting place you have been, whether close to home or at the ends of the earth. Click here to comment.

 

 

 

You Might Be Surprised At What You Can Learn When You Travel

(I couldn't trace this back to its source.  It's been floating around Facebook.  Let me know if you know its origins.)

Traveling broadens the mind.  It helps you see the world through different eyes.  It gives you the best opportunity to understand other cultures and other ways of life.  Yadda yadda yadda.  Yeah, we know.

What rarely comes up, though, is what it’s like to try to explain your own country to an interested foreigner who might ask a simple question about something he’s heard on the news.

At a dinner with friends during my Paris adventure, Alain turned and asked if I thought President Obama would win the election (quick – can you name the president of France*).  I tried to explain that it would be close because the Republican Party had raised an unfathomable amount of money already for this campaign and weren’t done yet.  He then asked so innocently, “Well, can’t the Democrats just raise more money too?”

Yikes!  How do I explain to someone from a country that has its first round of votes in April, has the presidential election in May, and then a couple of weeks later has a completely new government up and running about the unholy amounts of money involved in a marathon election road that starts two years ahead of the vote.  How much should I say about PACs and Super-PACs, Citizens United, “corporations are people, too,” and that there seems to be up to $6 billion lying around, seemingly unneeded, just to throw away on trying to defeat a political enemy while tens of millions of citizens are un- or under-employed.  “C’est compliqué,” was all I could muster.

And there are some things even harder to put into words.

The day after I returned home, before I had time simply to unpack, a deranged man with orange hair burst into a dark movie theater and shot over 70 people watching a Batman film.  My own son was at the same movie that night.  It could have just as easily been our town, in the theater where my son sat.   The shooter would have taken out more victims if his 100-round magazine on his automatic weapon hadn’t jammed.  Two weeks later another man walked into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and started firing at anyone who moved.  The most we can assume is that he thought those wearing Sikh turbans were really Muslims.  As if that explains it all.

I don’t know which would be harder to explain to friends outside the U.S. – how easy it is to acquire guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition in this country compared to all other first-tier industrialized nations or how we’ve let intolerance and discrimination get so out of hand.  The same week of the Sikh murders in Wisconsin, a mosque in Joplin, MO (my home state) was burned to the ground.  It was the second attempt at arson.  And a mosque that had called Murfreesboro, TN home for a three decades endured two years of protests, lawsuits, vandalism, attempted bombing, and other obstacles before it was allowed to open the doors of its new building this week.  The Muslim community had faced arguments from “if they build, then more will come – bringing terrorism and their sharia law with them” to “Islam is not a religion” (go here, here, here, and here to watch a 4-part report on this controversy).

Yesterday I rode my bike past a gleaming new middle school going up in my neighborhood, completely wired for the future, with athletic fields, art rooms, modern science labs, and theater space.  I wonder how I would explain to someone from another country that when the school year starts in two weeks a couple of miles away they would find a school with no laptops, out-of-date textbooks, rooms that may not have been painted in twenty years, and drop-out rates of astronomical proportions.  Most days I don’t even understand myself why we continue with an education system that seems to bless my children over the children of parents living around the corner.

Yes, I know that every country can count on all of their fingers and every little piggy on their feet just as many faults in their society as I see in mine.  But that’s another reason traveling – whether across the globe or just to across the 50 states – can enrich us.  While we’re trying to learn about someone else, that person may want to learn about our own small part of the world.  However, when we tell them, they may then ask the more difficult question “Why?”  That’s when the learning really begins.

On a lighter note, how do you explain

this restaurant outside of Natchez, MS?

What’s the most difficult or interesting question anyone has asked you about where you live?  Is there a particular part of your culture that you feel like you’re always having to explain or defend?  Share your travel lessons in the comments box.

I’ve suffered from a blog deficiency since the end of my time in France.  An assortment of issues have stolen my time and writing mojo.  If you left comments on my last couple of posts and I didn't respond, please forgive me.  I have to leave town again this week and next week on family business.  However, I promise to get back into the groove.  There are still more pictures and stories from France to share.  Thanks for hanging in there.

*Francois Hollande, President of France

Road Trip Reflections

America along highway 70, between St. Louis and Kansas City

Earlier this year when I was planning to drive from St. Louis to Michigan to see my daughter at college, my French friend Martine asked me about the drive.  What kind of towns would I go through?  What does the scenery look like?  How long would it take?  She tried hard to imagine my description, but she had some difficulty conjuring up the vast expanses of emptiness in a country of over 300,000,000 people.  How could I drive for 50 miles or more without ever encountering a town?  In France you can frequently see the next village before you’ve even left your current one.

Perhaps the size of this country accounts for the fact that only about 20% of its citizens have a passport (OTTI).  Without leaving its borders, I could explore the mountains of the Olympic Penisula, spend a summer on the Appalachian trail, hit the beach along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, warily commune with alligators in steamy Florida swamps, see some of the world’s greatest art in New York City, or eat at Lambert’s Café (“The Only Home of Throwed Rolls”), in Sikeston, Missouri.  Why would I ever need to leave?

Americans are travelers.  They are Jack Kerouac On-the-Road roamers, they are Lewis and Clark explorers, they are move-West-young-man people.  When I’m traveling south, however, and hit the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains north of Atlanta I look at the deep, black forests around me choked with pine trees and tangled mountain laurel and wonder what motivated anyone to climb another ridge and move forward, or settle in this or that valley with seemingly no way out.  On the other hand, when I’m on the long highways of the American West I try to see with old eyes and understand what could have possibly made anyone choose to settle anywhere in these inhospitable regions.  Was it just pure exhaustion from constantly moving forward?

Same highway, 30 miles down the road

My favorite American traveler, William Least Heat-Moon, questioned why we travel in a Wall Street Journal article.   I think he might be a bit generous as to why many travel today (“we all set out motivated by curiosity of one degree or another”), when so many hit the all-inclusive resort and never leave the tiki bar or the casino, or their curiosity extends only to whether this outlet mall is different from one back home or if this chain restaurant might offer any regional “specialties.”

The therapy of the open road, he reminds us, is always possible:

On a stretch of open road, a driver can roll along with his window reflection laid over the           landscape ahead so that he must see through himself to see the territory …. For drivers who never see past their own reflection and on into the landscape beyond, any road and any place is as good as any other. If travel is not about connection, then it is not worth the carbon expended to arrive….

I’m grateful that there are travelers like Heat-Moon who go farther for longer than I can.  Two of my favorite words are “road trip.”  However, I know that even after a month and a half in France I start dreaming of my own pillow and the familiarity of my kitchen layout.  I want to return to my neighborhood Mexican restaurant even as I linger over the pure chocolate perfection of the mousse at the café down the street in Dijon.  I want to see the trees lining my own street instead of another tree whose name is unfamiliar.

The problem with longing for home is that I get there and grow more complaisant, less curious.  The winds of the moment shape my day rather than a desire to connect with something new.  I’m distracted by who’s up/who’s down in presidential polls.  I find it imperative that I shampoo the carpet or wash the dog.  What I’ll cook for dinner actually becomes an issue in my day.

But then I remember I’m one of those lucky few who has both a passport and a real, non-digital, road atlas of America.  I start imagining where I can roll again.  Sometimes my favorite part of the trip is those 50 miles with nothing but my own reflection in the windshield.  But connecting with the places and people at the end of the road are what give me something to write home about.

The moonscape on a road between the Grand Canyon and Sedona, AZ

Do you have your passport yet?  Where would you go first when you get it?  What's your favorite road trip in America?  Reflect on road tripping in the comments section and give us a reason to jump in the car.