Clift: Summer Trips

The joy of traveling began when I was a child, and the highlight of the summer was a family trip to Toronto to visit my father’s relatives. On the eve of the trip, my sister and I packed new shorts, t-shirts, and sandals to be ready when the alarm went off at 6am. Teeth brushed and combed, we jumped in the back of the black Buick and didn’t argue with our brother over the window seat. We were too busy savoring breakfast at Howard Johnson’s, part of the annual ritual that always kicked off our journey to another country.

Every year we did a different route to enjoy the landscape. Before the interstate and Holiday Inns, we drove through Pennsylvania Dutch country or New England or upstate New York, where we visited the Ithaca Gorges, the 1000 Islands, and of course Niagara Falls. Every night we sought out AAA-approved cabins to sleep in, with their worn linoleum floors, chenille bedspreads, and the inevitable chandeliers. We thought it was pure paradise (except for the spiders).

Crossing the border was like going to a forbidden country. We had to answer questions about where we were going, why, and for how long, and reassure customs officials that we had nothing illegal with us. Once cleared to proceed, we headed to the falls to ride the Maid of the Mist boat that went behind the falls, spraying us with water.

In Toronto, we checked into the Royal York Hotel, where a small man in a maroon uniform roamed the lobby every day yelling, “Call Mr. Smith!” “Call Mr. Jones!” The next morning, before heading to my grandfather’s cabin, we had breakfast at The Honeydew restaurant. Only then were we prepared for the obligatory visits that awaited us.

Later, when I was in my early 20s, I took my first solo trip to Europe. I thought I had died and gone to heaven while experiencing Amsterdam, London, Paris, Rome and the Swiss landscape, relying on travel books that promised you could do this kind of thing cheaply. Enjoying every moment and every conversation with fellow travelers from different cultures, I thought I would go crazy with pleasure. I marveled at the sight of Michelangelo’s David, wept in St. Mark’s Square, thrilled at the spectacle of the changing of the guard, sat in cafes on the Champs Elysees and smiled back at Mona Lisa. I even fell in love twice. More importantly, I knew my life had changed and I would never stop traveling.

Luckily, I married a Brit who loves to travel as much as I do and with whom I was able to travel internationally thanks to his work and later mine. We even lived for a year in Thailand when I got a teaching job there. So we traveled like cockroaches, running around Southeast Asia, discovering new foods, new art and music, new friends, beautiful rituals and other ways of life.

The trips also offer a diverse and sometimes spectacular education. History, art, literature, and religious beliefs come to life as we are exposed to other cultures, rituals, and norms. We become more curious, we learn new ways of thinking or expressing ourselves, and we grow in ways we never imagined.

Traveling also offers challenges. Before there was a single currency in Europe, I had to learn to convert currencies, to communicate without a common language, and to know the difference between the Alps and the Pyrenees. It was instructive and fun. I also had to develop negotiation skills and know how to deal with dangerous situations. Luckily, in my experience, there is always someone who can help.

Traveling, if possible, can simply be an enjoyable experience or a profoundly life-altering event. For me it was both and I see it as a great blessing.

That is why I continue to agree with Mark Twain, who stated that traveling is attractive, among other things because it is “fatal to prejudice, intolerance and narrow-mindedness”. Like Twain, whose travel account gave us “Innocents Abroad,” I think that “it would be nice if such an excursion could be held every year and the system inaugurated periodically.”

Traveling may have seemed like a thing of the past during the pandemic. Now we may find ourselves changing places due to the climate crisis or different opportunities. We may prefer more café tours and fewer visits to cathedrals and museums, plus more chat with the locals. But I am among those travelers who are not willing to let a passport expire because I never know when I might feel a strong need to cry again in Venice, to learn something new, to make new friends or to count cats in Zanzibar.

Elayne Clift lives in Brattleboro.