It was no surprise, then, that I entered my adult years with a serious case of wanderlust.
My lifelong friend Phyllis Bieri and I left for a three-month trip to the British Isles the summer that we were eighteen. Serendipitously, while staying at our friend Liz Granirer's London flat the first week that we were there, we met some friends who were traveling back to their flat in Paris by car the next day. And so then there we were in Paris, visiting museums, riding the Metro, and sharing baguettes. Our carefully planned "trip to the British Isles" had morphed into a way more exciting "trip through southern Europe to North Africa."
Seven months later, I returned home. (Because Phyllis had a wedding to attend, she stuck to the original timeframe.) In the interim, we managed to visit France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and the charming, tiny nations of San Marino and Andorra—neither of which we had ever even heard of prior to our trip.
This was—as Phyllis says—a seminal experience for both of us. She went on to spend more of her college years studying abroad in Germany, while I went back again to study in London and France. How lucky we both were to have had those fantastic early experiences!
Of course, those experiences led each of us to many more travels later on. Phyllis visited Northern Europe, Central & South America, Turkey and Israel. I visited Hong Kong & Taipei, lived in Thailand, and spent a year and half Japan (where Phyllis had had her early childhood travel experiences, and was able to join me once again during a brief travel-leave from medical school).
Now my eighteen year old son, Polo, is in Ireland. His seventeen year old friend Maiya is spending the month in Rwanda. As I read their emails, jot down hastily scribbled & highly exotic notes from their phone calls ("HOWTH--looking over a cliff's edge!;" "SINE--the highly-regarded color of cows!"), and link to their blogs, I am extremely grateful that they are each having these amazing early experiences. It really hits home for me how very deeply I believe in the educational power of travel.
