I retain no memory of my first trip. My family traveled from our home in the San Fernando Valley to Portland, Oregon, but I was too young then and am too old now to have any recollection of it. But it must have made an impression for a year later, when we embarked on our first major trip to Hawaii, I packed my cheap little suitcase a full week in advance. My parents still laugh how, out of necessity prior to our departure, I’d sneak into the bag to get clothes for the day only to slyly replace them so they’d be there for the islands.
Specific details of that trip are elusive, but certain images are quite vivid. The wild pink and spacious grounds of the old Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. Watching my brothers learn to surf on battered orange longboards far out in the waves off Waikiki. I recall the endless pleasure I found in a little sand bar off Poipu. The idea that I could stand in the middle of the Pacific - me, “the little dude,” as I was called by my brothers - enthralled me without limit.
I suspect many have similar memories that ingrained in them a desire to see more of the world and explore new things. Those of us blessed enough to have had these experiences tend to take them for granted sadly, but the origins remain whether we recognize our good fortune or not.
Most of my travel now consists of business trips and the odd weekend getaway. The family adventures are long in the past, and the spontaneous trips with friends become more and more scarce as we are necessarily consumed by the demands of our adult lives, whether they be work or children or just getting by in this cockamamie world. Still I get excited every time I prepare to set off for some place new. Even an overnight business trip to Peoria in the heart of winter holds a certain allure. I consider the painful joys of the airport, the now anonymous people I might meet. Maybe I’ll find a quaint restaurant or an old movie house to enjoy after a long day of meetings. There’s just something captivating about the unknown.
I find myself often planning adventures I know I am unlikely to take. I imagine exploring Petra and the Jordanian desert on camelback. See myself canoeing down the Mekong. I investigate hotels, survey airfares, take extensive notes. Someday maybe, I say. And maybe someday I will indeed find myself wandering along The Great Wall at sunrise. But it hardly matters; the thought and expectation of an experience, the mere idea that such a journey into the personally unknown is possible, even feasible, is enough to thrill my mind and satiate my passing hunger.
I realize much of this is a dream of escape from a life that failed thus far to meet the lofty expectations “the little dude” had for himself. A foolish notion that if I were to simply go somewhere else I might find some nobler meaning in an otherwise humdrum existence. Still, if we didn’t believe somewhere inside us that there was something greater out there, an experience to be had more fulfilling, would we feel compelled to explore the world at all?
