Travel to Gravel
It has just come to my realization that this was the day we were supposed to return from our big summer family trip to Krakow, Poland. I had rented a palace with fifteen rooms with separate baths for ten days, just twenty minutes from the Krakow. Joining us, much like at a Manor House in Western Ireland last summer, a Chateaux (castle) on the Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy, in a series of Riads in Morocco and several prior villas in Italy and Mexico, were supposed to be a full collection of our family, my family, Kim’s family and an array of our closest friends. I usually rent for two weeks and have my family one week and Kim’s family the other. This is just a matter of rental villa size…not so much in terms of beds, but certainly in terms of bathrooms. I have learned over the years that just providing beds doesn’t cut it. There is nothing that pours cold water on a family vacation like an insufficiency of bathrooms. We can survive small rooms, hard beds, no air conditioning, mediocre food and less than perfect weather, but inconveniencing someone’s daily constitutional is a show-stopper. I solved that problem by finding more “exotic” places to go where there are big homes for rent. We were very pleased with Western Ireland and were very much looking forward to Krakow. Every year I wondered where off the beaten path I would find a large rental house next year, but now I have a deposit on a palace in Krakow in the bank, so I’m all set so long as any number of things go our way in the future.
In addition to a full list of interesting things to do in and around Krakow (a much more interesting and historical city than Warsaw or many other cities), Kim and I planned a little post-trip to somewhere I have always found interesting. We decided to drive south through Slovakia and Hungary to go into the mountains of Transylvania in Romania. I was told to avoid the Romanian capital of Bucharest due to security reasons, but was also told that the Transylvanian hills were perfectly safe and well worth the visit. The highlight destination was to be Dracula’s Castle, but the real attraction was to do something unique and travel to somewhere unusual.
It has gotten harder and harder to find a place to travel and visit that has not become a regular whistle-stop for anyone with an internet connection. When I thought of going to Antarctica, I heard of some dear friends who made the trip with the grandson of Ernest Shackleton. I found myself wondering how to feel special going to the Seventh Continent when others had just gone with the scion of the Captain of the Endurance. That seems silly to think that way, but feeling good and special about travel is a part of the process. I have long harbored a dream to go to Easter Island to see the the Moai stone heads. Easter Island is such a remote spot that it is really only accessed either on a few Polynesian cruises or on flights between Chile and New Zealand. You have to really want to go there to do so. It is literally not on the way to anywhere unless perhaps you are Chilean with business in Auckland. Either that or you are a sailer who wants to follow the path of Kon-Tiki or perhaps the H.M.S. Bounty in and around the neighboring Pitcairn Island. But then I heard that Easter Island is not a place you want to spend more than a day since it is very small and has but one thing to do…seeing those stone heads.
I am pretty well-traveled and consider myself very creative when it comes to planning a family gathering. Had I just gotten back from Krakow today, flying on Air Canada through Vancouver, over the pole, I would have to start thinking about our next trip and I must say, I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet. When I am far less glad about is that we have all lost a year of travel. We have cancelled three outbound European trips, several transcontinental trips and countless inbound family and friend visits, all thanks to the pandemic. That makes us like everyone else for the most part, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling. We were big travelers and felt it was something we could give our family and friends. Experiences like foreign travel seems so much more meaningful than any material gift we could ever given them. We have literally introduced many of our family and friends to foreign travel experiences that they would have likely never done without our program.
The pandemic has caused me to ponder the travel trends of the aging population of the world. In one sense its great that we are a global generation that wants to see the rest of the world. On the other hand, I tend to think we have all over-done the travel bug. But that has all come to an abrupt stop. I chuckle to myself when I see the email blasts from Viking or Road Scholar and note that now Roadtripper (a U.S. car trip website) is increasingly in my inbox. Indeed, our summer trip this year is about ten days away and is a road trip planned on Roadtripper north along the California coast up through the Redwoods and into the Oregon coast to the Columbia River Gorge and then back down the inland route past Crater Lake, the quiet northeast corner of California known for its hot springs and Lake Tahoe. It’s a trip we had wanted to take and we have to suffice watching the kids enjoying our house in Ithaca for the summer and doing this trip with just two friends (with whom we will remain socially distant).
Let’s face it, our lives have changed, maybe forever and maybe just for a while, but I’m guessing it will be a change for a long, long time. And nowhere is that change felt more than in our travel plans. Kim and I have already acknowledged to ourselves that we will probably use this as a logical excuse to gear down on our travel. That is not a bad thing, it is just a different thing. Both Kim and I are extremely well-travelled. We have seen a good deal of the world and we do not need to run a “can you top this” race at this stage of our lives. So we have made no future travel plans as yet…not even back to NYC.
We are now all about finding peace on our little hilltop and that seems to be coming easiest through our gardening and planning out our current Cecil Memorial Garden. We have made that garden all about rocks, trees and flowers and those are wonderful substitutes for the most exotic spots on the earth to which we might otherwise travel. Our nephew Will put a title on it for us the other day, he said we were going from travel to gravel and we felt that fit. Then I got a call from our motorcycle tour group asking if we were interested in a January motorcycle trip to Patagonia that offered a chance to go to Antarctica if we wanted. Without hesitation and despite the whole travel to gravel thing, we signed up immediately. Some habits die hard.