As summer approaches, my travel cravings grow with a yearning to travel abroad, climb hilly towns, sample exotic foods, and experience culture shock.
Friends and family are used to me asking, “Where are you going? What are you doing? Where are you staying?” This year, there are already many different itineraries planned: one couple touring the vineyards of Portugal; my brother-in-law hiking in Croatia; my upstairs neighbors taking their two sons to Japan; even our apartment manager is planning a repeat safari in Tanzania.
I know exactly where my travel fantasies originated: As a child in the 1960s, my parents would take me to our local museum's Tuesday Night Travelogue, which featured 16mm film and vibrant slide shows of tulip fields in the Netherlands, bullfights in Mexico, and bikini-clad beaches in Brazil. I was obsessed with all the travel destinations and never missed a National Geographic feature.
My parents took several international trips, bringing back booze miniatures and trinkets from Israel and Greece to fill my shelves, and the boy across the street brought over little bottles of Caribbean beer he'd bought on a trip to St. John in the Virgin Islands, which I spritzed into my cheeks like holy water, though I now suspect it may have come from his sink.
But my own childhood excursions were limited: Lake Erie, Chautauqua, Boca Raton, Florida. But I talked a lot. A camp buddy's mother approached me in the supermarket and asked how I enjoyed my “Oriental” trip, which included stops in Tokyo, Peking (now Beijing), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). I told her son we'd visited all three countries, but I didn't expect the news to reach my mother. We should have stuck to domestic locations.
As I got older, my travels were limited by asthma and a fear of flying, and I was never able to study abroad for even a semester like my friends at university. But in 1979, I took a three-week solo trip to Italy during a work break and took hundreds of Nikon photos that remind me that I really could travel long distances if I wanted to.
My wife and I had a six-week honeymoon in 1981 that took us from Lisbon, Portugal, to Rome, and included a charcuterie picnic by Swan Lake, visiting Maurice Chevalier's mistress in Arles, France, and eating (by mistake) calf brains that tasted like gravel in Barcelona, Spain, among other unforgettable memories. But in the 43 years since then, apart from my daughter's wedding in Toronto and at a vineyard in Italy (where we practically walked on air), I've hardly set foot on foreign soil.
So why are we stuck at home so much, when our hearts yearn to travel? There are many reasons: work, kids, time zone issues, 9/11, COVID-19, dogs. But the real resistance is internal. Going far is fine, but what about the stressful, disruptive reality? I don't really like it, especially the return flight, with its inevitable airport delays, turbulence, lost luggage, and jet lag fatigue. Now that I'm home, I don't have to fear a long walk. And frankly, the food is better here than there, the water pressure, the mattresses, and of course the drivers.
I know that long-distance travel can recharge your batteries and give you a fresh perspective and appreciation for your everyday life and your zip code. Being a tourist in a new place is always enlightening, but it also requires you to get out of your comfort zone. It takes immense willpower to even go to dinner across the city, much less across the world.
As I get older, I've also started to calculate the cost of straying too far: losing my iPhone, getting food poisoning, or worse. My sister recently returned from an incredible five-week trip in India with a vial of rabies vaccine to protect her from stray dog bites. That cost would keep the Taj Mahal intact.
And yet, my world-traveling dreams have been fulfilled, thanks to an apartment plastered with vintage travel posters. Our walls are adorned with landscapes of the colorful, sun-drenched French Riviera, a Danish village, sheep grazing on idyllic hills overlooking the River Tweed in Scotland, the whitewashed Greek island of Andros, and giraffes traversing the Serengeti. Just walking from room to room is enough to stamp the passport of my heart.
This summer is much the same as last summer and the one before that: I'll commute to a weekend cottage 95 miles away and spend two weeks at the beach. I have no plans to go to East Asia. But I still get fascinated by the 1930s railway poster opposite my bed, advertising India's enchanting Shillong Valley (the “Scotland of the East”). It's a utopian view of cozy thatched-roof cottages surrounded by lush forests, just “24 hours” from Calcutta.
Maybe next summer.
Alan Lipp runs a public relations firm in New York.
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