I was born in a broom closet in Arequipa, Peru, in 1971. My parents were not military and not missionary: my father had a job opportunity in manufacturing management at a Carnation milk factory and my mother taught English. They were 23 and 24 when they went. A couple years in, they had two babies, which is a bold move in the early 70s in a developing country, though I suppose that thinking is silly because women have babies literally everywhere, right?
I was born in that broom closet because there was no available room in the hospital. My mom remembers looking up at cobwebs in the windows while she was pushing. My dad had to go out and get the hospital supplies because they didn’t have any available at the hospital. There was a doctor, but otherwise it sounded like a true DIY birth experience in a dirty room to me.
We had a maid at the time who helped around the house and she fed me a lot of flan so I could get my calcium. I was a pretty chubby baby. (I go crazy for good flan still to this day.) However, my first words were Spanish, so there’s that.
My parents left when I was about 18 months old and we began our lives as a family in the United States. But they were always planning for the next abroad vacation—as much as you can with little kids and 2 careers. When I was young, we would pack up the 1956 Pontiac and drive down to Baja, Mexico for vacations. There’s no good reason a family of 4 should drive an old car to Mexico, but that was the way that we did vacation. I remember my parents putting a big green cooler between myself and my younger sister so we wouldn’t fight.
In high school I began to study Spanish and when I went to college, I took Spanish classes and got a Spanish minor. My junior year I studied abroad in Santiago, Chile, and traveled all the way north to the salt desert and south to the southern fjords. After I graduated from college, I spent a year in Loja, Ecuador, a small city in the Andes, teaching English at the university there. After college, I got a teaching certificate in (guess what) Spanish and then went on to get a master’s degree in Romance language linguistics. (Not so useful, but I did meet my husband there, so maybe that was worth the $20k). I went on to teach Spanish at local businesses and at Boise State.
So, the first 25 years of my life were marked by studying Spanish language and culture and traveling around Latin America. The decade after that I traveled less because, you know, when you’re early in your career, getting married, and then having kids your available funds and time for travel shrink to near zero. I did find myself working in the translation industry, in account management and then marketing. That work did take me once to India. I was newly pregnant while in India but didn’t know it. I thought my gurgling belly and slight discomfort was because of the food.
Once our son was old enough to manage his own luggage without whining (approx 9), we began heading out a lot more. We took our son to 20 countries before we sent him off to college. Thailand, Vietnam, Croatia, China, Turkey, Amsterdam, Mexico, France, Italy, Peru, and the UK. Together we saw The Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, Machu Picchu, the Hagia Sophia, Stonehenge, the Longdon Bridge, and so many amazing markets, churches, and landscapes. Together we ate crickets, guinea pig, alpaca, and snails. Yes, we had some long bus rides, ate bad food and got sick, got rashes, and left our stuff on planes/trains/automobiles, but these memories are everything to me. I have photos of my son with his face in his cell phone in a lot of places, but I do think he appreciated his travel adventures with mom & dad.
So, I’m a traveler.
That defines me as much as the titles of mom, business owner, wife, Idahoan. Travel is in my DNA. It is what we save our money for and our travel goals influence how we spend money. We aren’t doing house repairs that we should probably need to do because we choose travel over new carpet. I'll never buy a boat because that's, like, 6 trips. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’m so lucky that my husband also loves to travel and that we travel well together. In recent years, he and I visited Ireland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland. We’re going to Ecuador, Sri Lanka, and India this year. Especially in this empty nest phase of our lives, I’m grateful that we have this big thing that we can do together.
What travel does for us
There are a few reasons I love travel so much.
It’s just pure good adventure. Seeing things that you just don’t see at home, trying new food, meeting people who don’t live the same way you do. It’s all just so much fun. One of the best experiences of my life was riding Vespas with my family in a sea of other motorbikes on the crowded streets of Saigon. It’s a flow of such massive scale, not unlike a million red blood cells coursing through a body’s veins. There are no accidents; everyone just merges in an out in a peaceful, easy stream. I'll never forget the experience of riding in a Jeep all over the Moroccan dessert with some new friends from Ohio, seeing oases, movie sets, groups of camels, and Bedouin yurts. No road, just dirt tracks that only the locals know about. The driver put on the Eagles, but didn’t speak a word of English.
Then there is the introduction to new cultures that not only makes you appreciate your own, but exposes you to the way other people do things. Sometimes those ways are better than the way you are used to seeing things done. For example, other countries really have figured out medical care, public transportation, taking care of people with low income, providing for public education and childcare. Seeing all this in practice in other countries, and the effects on society of doing it well, has definitely affected my politics and values. Data shows that about 23% of Americans have never left the United States—wouldn’t it be interesting to drop every American in a foreign country for a week or 2 to see how else people can live, govern, and do business?
It also gets you out of your comfort zone, which makes you realize just how much you can handle. It’s easy to not take risks and try new things. It’s much easier to just stay in your zip code going to the same restaurants and stores month after month. Leaving comfort behind to navigate a confusing London subway, read a menu in Arabic, or make do when the airlines lose your luggage: these things test your resilience and ability to figure things out.
Once, I got a fungus on my scalp—who the hell knows how—and my hair was coming out. Something had to be done and my Ecuadorian friends just told me to go talk to the pharmacist. I talked to her with hand gestures and facial gestures and she finally gave me an ointment. I understood ‘atrocious fungus’ (hongo atroz) and that’s about it. No Google translate app at the time. It got better, but greasy ointment hair is not a good look.
There’s also great value in learning and speaking other language. There’s no better way than to get inside the heart and soul of a culture than to learn how they express themselves in their own language. Beliefs, values, and worldview manifest in the words people use and the way a language is constructed. For example, English and Spanish are very different in the levels of formality and respect that are embedded in the grammar. Sometimes I think of phrases in Spanish before I do an English because they’re just better, and vice versa. Learning another language has helped me understand my own world better and allowed me to enter the world of another. That’s more enriching than being monolingual for sure. (I’m a linguist, I can really nerd out on this stuff).
A few more highlights
There are so many stories...here are a few more of my favorites.
When I was traveling around Ecuador, I once rode a midnight bus up the Andes to Quito, the Ecuadorian Capital. That’s a 10 hour drive on very very windy mountain roads, mostly in the dark. Locals were traveling with their bushes of onions and their live chickens. It was a noisy mayhem, just a normal bus ride. We collided with a cow and killed it. Many of the passengers jumped out, butchered the cow, and wrapped up chunks in whatever they had. The bus driver loaded us back up and we moved on. It feels like a fever dream, but I swear it happened.
Ephesus, an ancient city in Turkey, was a true wonder. Founded in the 10th c BC, it was the second largest city in the Roman empire. The thing that blew my mind most was not the huge library, not the temple or colosseum that fit 25k people, but the public toilets. A big open air room with a dozen stone thrones. I really had a sense of people being there, doing their business. That's history coming alive, right??? (Photo below).
In Chang Mai, after a full day of touring, we came across a busy open air restaurant and walked in. A woman gestured to a table, and we sat confused for a while until she brought us piles and piles of food we had not ordered. (You get what you get, and you don't throw a fit). We got wonderful piles of meatballs, some kind of Pho soup, and mountains of herbs to rip up into the soup. The bill was $12.
In England, we experienced the palpable spiritual energy of Stonehenge. Whatever really happened there, it was big, it was human, it was essential and eternall. We felt the same way in Machu Picchu. Those places are sacred and you really can sense it.
It’s a privilege, but also a choice
I recognize that travel is a huge privilege. Not everyone can take three weeks off from work, though there’s internet literally everywhere these days and I’ve done plenty of work on my phone on a bus or in a hotel room in the evening.
At the same time, travel is definitely not for everyone.
Sometimes it's downright uncomfortable: the 14-hour flights in the cheap seats; food that just does not agree with you, or that you just don't like. (SO MUCH stewed goat in Morocco). You’ll check into a hotel that’s too noisy, too hot, with old mattresses and musty towels. You’ll find a condom package in the bedside table. You will have brought the wrong shoes. You’ll get massive bug bites during the jungle hike. Once after a trip to Mexico both Jason and I were sick for a full month. Poop tests, diarrhea, rounds of antibiotics, the works. There are so many ways to be out of sorts when you’re traveling. That’s all just part of it, but some people will reject a trip outright over the risk of being uncomfortable. I get it.
Travel is bug bites and sketchy meat and stomach cramps and also joy and wonder. All at the same time.
But it's also a choice, one my husband and I keep making instead of new carpet or a fixed-up kitchen. We'll take the dripping faucet over another year sitting at home. Because somewhere out there is another river of flowing humanity I can be a part of, another driver who doesn't speak English but loves the Eagles, another version of me standing in a new place that absolutely feels like it could be home.
I'll take my chances on all of it.
Below, clockwise: Simon and me at Macchu Picu, the toilets at Ephesus, the three of us at the Colca Canyon in Peru, Simon and me overlooking Dubrovnik.
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