Travel is in my blood: there's always a destination (and destiny) worth claiming

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel only read a page," said Saint Augustine. I'm many chapters into a lifetime of travel, a story I never want to end.

I love airports, especially in this season of summer travel. The intercom announcements of departing flights. The excitement of people as they line up to board, eager to reach their destination, readying themselves for the only feat of flight we humans are capable of.

I write this from the Liberia Airport in Costa Rica, my fourth visit to this beautiful, diverse and welcoming country, the 38th country I have visited or lived in during my life. I expect to add two more countries by the end of 2024: Portugal and Chile. I have had three homes: the United States, my birthplace, but also Sweden and Malta. Travel is in my blood. It stokes my creativity, brings new friends into my life, and always delivers new and sometimes strange, surprising experiences.

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash

Yet there is little in the first eighteen years of my life that prepared me for this life of wanderlust. I grew up in a middle-class family in a commuter suburb of Long Island, New York with little money for travel, especially abroad. As a family, we flew only once, to Walt Disney World in Florida, when I was 12. Most summer vacations consisted of trips to Long Island beaches, a few days with my mother’s family in Massachusetts, and 4-H camp in Riverhead, Long Island.

Destiny first found me in Europe

I didn’t feel deprived until at age 19, when I returned home from a semester abroad in London while my three American “sisters” who shared the same host family stayed behind to tour other parts of Europe. That was a summer of profound moping. I spent my days in my room making a collage memory book of ticket stubs and leaflets of every play I’d seen, concert I’d attended, ancient site I’d visited and photo after photo of a world I hadn’t wanted to leave behind.

In my mid-20s I traveled with a boyfriend to Italy and France, the typical American attempt to see Florence, Rome, and Paris in a whirlwind ten days. It left me barely sated. So when, at 28, a childhood American friend who lived in Sweden invited me to visit, I jumped at the chance. As fate would have it, she introduced me to the man who I would marry a year later, making plans to uproot my life and move to Sweden.

While my marriage had a serious fault line that would one day crack, a sturdy bridge between us for many decades was our mutual love of travel and a willingness to pick up and move to a new country. I will always be grateful for my ex-husband’s sense of adventure because it was with him that this Long Island girl finally found her footing in the world. A seasoned solo backpacker through Central and South America and Southeast Asia, he whetted my appetite for more exotic travel. Before having our daughters, we backpacked through Southeast Asia. Certain memories of that trip are indelible, like having a baby orangutan jump into my arms while walking a path in a Malaysian forest where once captive animals were being rehabilitated to return to the wild.

Passing on the travel genes

Given their parents’ penchant for travel, it’s no wonder that our daughters became global nomads. Born in Sweden, when they were 12 and 14 we moved to Malta as a family adventure where they attended an international school with students of some 40 nationalities, a mini United Nations situated in charming stone buildings that were former World War II barracks surrounded by a moat (with goats that liked to climb trees) and views of the Mediterranean Sea.

During their school vacations, we showed them the world: China, Turkey, Morocco, Cambodia, Egypt, and the Dominican Republic among them as well as all over Europe. Travel got into their blood, too. Educated in Sweden, Malta, the U.S., London, Bonn and Budapest, they are multi-lingual dual-nationals, at home anywhere in the world. My oldest daughter Marielle who lives in Barcelona will soon have visited or lived in 60 countries. Her younger sister Sara, who lives in Paris, counts dozens of countries on her list, too. Like their mother, they found love on their travels: for Marielle, it was in a vineyard in Chile, and for Sara, at a nightclub in Morocco. In 2023, Marielle fulfilled a lifelong dream to travel for a year, some of which she captured on her blog, Marielle Meanders, and her travel poetry.

Riding horses in Petra in Jordan with Marielle in 2012.

I recognize the privilege in my ability to travel as I do, and to open up the world to my daughters. But I am also proud of my hard work that made travel possible, still does, and always will. As Atticus said, “Some days, I grow tired of life, and long for the next great adventure.”

1950s daring plants the seeds of adventure

And perhaps I underestimated the lack of travel genes in my parents. After all, had my mother Freda, the sheltered only child of doting parents in Lowell, Massachusetts not taken the train into New York City with her girlfriends one fine spring day in 1959, she would not have met my father Norman as they sat on bar stools in Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village and he leaned over to flirt with this young vivacious brunette.

And my father wouldn’t have been in that bar had he not enlisted in the Korean War and been stationed in the Philippines, returning to New York to attend Columbia University on the G.I. bill. For my Jewish mother, meeting and falling in love with this Protestant man was a daring adventure in itself in 1959. Together, they would plant the seeds of a daughter who would travel the world, and in turn give birth to a new generation of wanderers, searching the world for love and adventure.

Where it all began: tracking down Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village where my parents met in 1959, now a rather neglected basement of a sports bar.

And now, in my sixth decade, I feel the tug of a new destination (and destiny, the two are entwined for me) beckoning. I have lived in Florida for a decade but the summers feel hotter, my feet are restless for what lays beyond the horizon as I walk the beach. I miss my daughters in Europe. The other side of the pond is calling to me once again. And come this August, I will take flight again, to Sweden, France and Spain, to visit dear friends and family and those global nomads of mine.

And on another fine September day, Marielle and I will begin our journey on the Camino de Santiago, that ancient pilgrimage, walking from Porto in Portugal to the the city of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, 200 kilometers or 120 miles. It’s a destination that has been calling to me for some time, and Marielle, too.

Perhaps by the end of our walk, I’ll see the outline of my next chapter.

I am ready to turn the page.

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P.S. A thank you to a subscriber

Constellations In Her Bones

who in an exchange of comments on her Substack said “I hope you write about your travels” and partly inspired this essay.

LET’S CHAT: How does travel fill you up? Please share a favorite travel story and your favorite travel song in the comments.

Travel Songs for the 3-D Life

With contributions from Marielle

“Horse with No Name,” America

“Collecting Sounds Around the World,” Max LL

“To The Mountains,” Lizzy McAlpine

“A Mermaid in Lisbon,” Patrick Watson

“Ends of the Earth,” Lord Huron