I Got Itchy Feet!

Growing up, I loved to travel. In fact, my first trip started before I was born. My dad was in the U.S. Army, stationed in Frankfurt, W. Germany. My pregnant mom joined him there several months before I was born in the Frankfurt Army Hospital. We came back to the U.S. when I was six months old and settled in Philadelphia, where my parents had grown up.

In our lower-working-class neighborhood, people didn’t travel. If and when families went on vacation, there were only two possible destinations: the Pocono mountains (2 hours north) or the Jersey shore (2 hours southeast). We started out as a Wildwood, N. J., shore family when I was very young.

The summer after I completed 3rd grade, my dad was sent to some kind of salesman school in Muskegon, Michigan for 2 weeks. We packed up the car and drove out to lovely Muskegon. I found that people talked funny there. Actually, we were the ones with accents. (Don’t tell a Philadelphia native that they sound like a Brooklynite – but it’s pretty darn close.) When I ordered a hot dog for lunch, the lady didn’t understand me. I ordered my usual, “Hut Dawg” – she finally said, “Oh, a Haht Dahg!”

That’s when I truly realized that people lived differently, spoke differently, and thought differently, even within our own country. I was fascinated

That was a great trip. A highlight was our visit to Holland, Michigan, with fields and fields of tulips, windmills, and my very own pair of wooden shoes. Of course, I used the wooden shoes and a blond wig to make my Halloween costume that fall – a little Dutch girl, with a white hat fashioned from lace-trimmed placemats.

I think that car trip proved that we could venture out beyond the beaten path around Philadelphia, and we started planning driving vacations each summer. We would chose a destination, get a TripTik from AAA, map our our route. We would plan our stops around interesting historical sites, natural formations, or museums. In this way, I saw Gettysburg civil war battlefields, the Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Corning Glass Works and Museum in New York. We went as far as Niagara Falls, Montreal, and Ottawa, Canada. The first badge I earned in Girl Scouts was the Collector badge, for my collection of postcards from our family travels. I wonder what ever happened to that scrapbook?

One of my favorite school projects was writing to the Chamber of Commerce in various state capitals to obtain information about their cities and states. What a variety of materials I received! I anxiously awaited the mail delivery, hoping for pictures and brochures from exotic locales such as Arizona, Iowa, and Oregon.

I didn’t fly in an airplane until I was in high school, and my parents and I flew down to visit my grandparents, who were spending the winter in Florida.

When we were dating, George and I used to dream up all kinds of trips. If we won the lottery, we said, we’d take a world tour so we could visit both of our birthplaces. George’s Dad was in the service too – George was born in a MASH unit outside Seoul, Korea. Eventually, we made a big trip – the move to Texas.

At first, our limited money dictated that any major vacations were spent visiting family in Pennsylvania. Gradually, we were able to sneak in nicer vacations to more interesting destinations: Las Vegas; New Mexico; San Francisco, LA, and San Diego; Seattle; New Orleans; Orlando; Cayman Islands; Cozumel; and many short driving trips around Texas and Lousiana: San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Laredo, Padre Island, Port Aransas, Shreveport, the Piney Woods of East Texas, Cajun country.

As an adult, I realized that my travels are pretty pitiful and have not been extensive. At least, not yet.

Over the past several years, our travels have been curtailed, due to work and family concerns. It finally dawned on me – we both say we love to travel, yet we are not making it a priority by setting aside time and money to go places. There are so many places within the US and Canada I want to explore, as well as Europe, Asia, Australia, etc.

We are both 43. If we don’t get with it, we won’t have time to do all the stuff we want. I don’t want to be one of those couples who put off their world travels until after retirement, and then one person up and dies the morning after the retirement party.

We’ve got to get busy – there are miles to do before I sleep!