I’ve been interested in traveling for a long time. Long before I knew I would move to Scotland to go to university, I was desperate to travel. I wanted to go to the beautiful places we learned about in history classes. I wanted to go to the exotic places where they spoke the languages I was studying. I didn’t really get the opportunity to travel until I came to university, but I sure did have inspiration and serious wanderlust.
One of the specific things that made me want to travel, especially in Europe, was my mom. After she graduated from graduate school, she and a couple of her friends did an 8-week backpacking trip through Europe. It’s pretty cliche, but I love it. I love the concept. I’ve probably romanticized the idea too much now, but I don’t care.
While my mom was on this trip, she decided instead of taking pictures or keeping a normal journal that she would write three post cards every day. She said the postcards were prettier than any pictures she would have taken. And on the back on the post cards are little summaries of what she did every morning, afternoon, and evening during her trip. She mailed them back to my grandmother every so often in bundles, and now I’ve got them all together.
A couple of summers ago, when I discovered them, I spent a couple of hours one afternoon reading all of them. It was so fascinating to me. She and her friends had a planned trip, but pretty much just did whatever they wanted to in the moment and went wherever they felt like. They found accommodation when they arrived in each city. They met people along the way, and sometimes met the same people later on the trip. In Munich they actually met someone from Atlanta (where they were based at the time) and knew the person she was engaged to. How crazy!
I’m really excited to be about to go to one of the destinations my mom went on that trip – finally! I’ll be going to Munich the day this post goes up. I’m excited not only because I think it’s going to be a really nice trip, but because this is the first time I get to really follow in the footsteps of my mom’s trip. Other than a couple of places in the UK, I haven’t been anywhere my mom went on this trip.
It might be kind of weird to talk about the trip like it’s a book, but the part in the trip where they went to Germany and Austria seemed like the most fun and made me want to be there.
I now really identify with the way my mom felt getting to travel extensively for the first time. She wrote in a few of the postcards about how weird it was to see the real paintings that we saw in textbooks and on the internet. It’s obviously not the same at all and the picture never does it justice, which is really true of everything – not just paintings. It’s a fun way to connect with my mom. We both will have these similar experiences and feel a similar way.
