Not sure if I’ll end up blogging much when we’re in Mexico next week but I thought making “travel” #4 in this series would be a good way to head into our holiday either way.
The funny part is that my love of travel actually starts from a weird piece of family trivia – I was born in 1973 and that happens to be the year my maternal grandparents moved from Saskatchewan to Kelowna, BC.
Of course that sounds like they were trying to get away from my crying, pooping self (and maybe they were?) but in the end, it ended up working out as I got the experience of traveling to BC at least once or twice a year for pretty much every year of my early life. As a bonus, most of these were car trips (and even the occasional train trip!) instead of by plane which meant all sorts of unique experiences and adventures during the two-day drive.
My parents both loved travel so growing up, our family visited a number of places across North America – from Vancouver for Expo ’86 to Quebec when they turned an invite to a family wedding in Winnipeg into an extended holiday, from as far north as La Ronge, Saskatchewan to as far south as Florida. Again, most of these trips were long driving trips instead of short(er) plane rides which meant we got to experience places in a different way than if you breeze through in a bus or fly over them in a plane.
One of our most memorable trips wasn’t in a car though – we had a two week vacation in Hawaii when I was grade five that was probably my first trip that felt like I was going somewhere completely new, exciting and foreign.
As I got older, I had high school friends who had been even more adventurous – one had moved to Germany to repeat her Grade 12 year but in German (a language she wasn’t super fluent in) and one who was a couple years older and moved to Japan to teach English after finishing University.
Partly inspired by those two friends, when an opportunity came up for a semester exchange to England through the U of R, I applied and was fortunate to grab one of only five spots available.
I only half-jokingly refer to that four month exchange “the single best four month stretch” of my life.
Part of it was how everything was so similar and yet so different in England (and Europe where I also got to spend time with a week in Paris before school started and a weekend in each of Edinburgh and Amsterdam arranged through the school.) Part of it was how the college I went to had a huge international exchange program with many countries so I got to live, study and interact with people not just from the United States but people from Japan, Germany and various other countries.
(As a side note, a friend I met on my exchange who was from Chicago was the person who first planted the seed of professional librarianship as a viable career in my mind. So traveling has obviously had a major influence on who I’ve become in an indirect way as well.)
My early experience with and love of travel is probably part of the reason I felt comfortable picking up stakes and moving to Calgary with Shea after she graduated from nursing and later, moving to London Ontario to complete my Masters.
Since doing my MLIS, a lot of my travel has been to various cities for professional conferences and to all-inclusives for personal reasons.
I know going on all-inclusive beach vacations isn’t widely regarded as “real” travel but I think of it like librarians think of reading. We tend to believe all reading is good reading and I believe the same is true of travel. Some people are like my friend who graduated high school in Scotland, moved to Australia then to Japan (coincidentally marrying the friend I mentioned earlier who had also moved to Japan!) and had all sorts of wild adventures including hitchhiking in Afghanistan by herself and so on. In terms of reading, she’s like the person who reads “War and Peace” or “Moby Dick” On the other hand, someone who visits an all-inclusive is sort of like the person who reads James Patterson (and of course they’re likely reading it on the beach!) Both are enjoyable, educational, and beneficial but in different ways.
In the end, travel has opened my eyes, made me more confident and made the world smaller. It’s helped me be more understanding and helpful with the many people I work with every day in the library who are often travelers themselves, having moved to Canada from elsewhere. And in three days, I’m fortunate that I’ll be traveling again! 🙂
