My parents trained me to dread travel.
I was the youngest of four sons. We were frugal, and we made long car trips only twice a year to northern Ohio.
They were journeys of obligation. Mom and Dad had escaped after spending their childhoods in Lima, but we would visit relatives there for a couple of days every summer and winter.
My main memory of those trips is of riding in silence for three hours in the back of a station wagon. These trips were non-stop – no breaks for restrooms or snacks. I’m sure our cars had radios, but we never turned them on.
This was the mindset I brought to my marriage 40 years ago. Judy’s parents lived even farther away. It was a five-hour drive to the Cincinnati area, if our clunky cars were up to the task. We often were on a tight budget and I worried throughout those trips about our tires and radiators.
Judy didn’t dread those trips. She came from a family that took great vacations together. She has happy memories of car trips with her mother, brother and two sisters to Florida, New England and Texas.
They stayed at small motels and swam in pools. They would have breakfast on the road with donuts or with single-serving cereal boxes that they poured their milk into. In mill towns back east, they would go to factory outlet stores and pick out school clothes. Her trips were adventures.
I’ve changed some but not entirely in the 40 years we’ve been married. I’ve become more confident and patient, but I’m still thinking “No” whenever we get an opportunity to travel.
I think “No” but force myself to say “Yes” because I know I need to go places to become a better person. It is like practicing your chipping or tee shots in golf. You can’t enjoy the game with just a putter.
So it was that Judy and I celebrated our 40-year anniversary with a trip to the Canadian Rockies. It’s something we had talked about because I had been to Banff and Glacier International Park in August 1976 on a three-man camping trip. That one came about because all three of us had reached flat spots in our lives.
Ed had returned from Vietnam and I had graduated from college, neither of us with job prospects. Mark had unrealistic hopes of medical school. I refer to this as my hippie backpacking tour, and I came back with four main stories.
Someday I may write more about what I learned from being inches away from a hungry a bear in a campground, from drinking warm 25-cent beers in the basement of the luxurious Banff Springs Hotel, from recognizing I actually could die on a solo mountain hike, and from stacking nine cases of beer in the back of Ed’s car for the ride home.
That trip was in Ed’s Chevy Vega. This one with Judy and me involved a drive to Chicago, a flight to Vancouver, a train ride to Kamloops and Banff, a bus ride to Calgary, flights to Minneapolis and Chicago, and a drive home. Planes, trains and automobiles.
Part of a travel experience is developing expertise. As such, we mastered the all-electric Roam buses in Banff. We like to think that we helped leave the mountain air slightly cleaner by not using a private vehicle for almost an entire week.
But another part is to keep some of those experiences to yourself. If my main purpose in travel is to compile a do-and-don’t list for others, I’ve just made myself an internationally bossy person. Rocky Mountaineering has carried a million people on those tracks between Vancouver and Banff, so I’m wise to keep my yap shut over which wine selection is best.
Still, each move we make results in change. Our brains do not return from a journey exactly the way they started.
On this trip to Banff, we took a gondola ride up Sulphur Mountain. This was not an easy choice for me. I’ve had a lifelong aversion to being in steep places.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been 110 stories up in the Sears Tower and 630 feet up in the Gateway Arch, hating every second of it. I’m worse than that. If I’m on the 10th floor of an office or hotel building, I’ll stay away from the window.
On Sulphur Mountain, I stood fearlessly at a railing at 7,000 feet. Peaks of nearby mountains were shrouded by clouds. The Banff Springs Hotel, for all its up-close majesty, seemed smaller than a green plastic house you would put on Baltic Avenue in a Monopoly game.
I was surprised to feel at peace at this altitude. Why is that?
The summit was solid ground, at least 7,000 feet deep. There was no slight sway like I felt in the Sears Tower. There were no creaks and groans like I heard at the arch.
It turns out, I’m not afraid of heights. I’m just understandably wary of shoddy carpentry.
So that’s my vacation report. I went to faraway places and came back feeling better about myself. I’m just not anxious to go again soon.