A Childhood of Road Trips
I’ve had a love of travel for as long as I can remember. I think one reason for this is that I’ve always felt I’ve had multiple homes. My father is a professor, and with the academic life comes uprootedness: my parents, both from eastern Pennsylvania, moved to a small town in Illinois before I was born and, despite initial misgivings, remain there to this day. For me as a child, this meant lots of road trips “back east.” Every summer (and some winter holidays), we would load up in the car for the one-and-half-day’s drive to Mountain Top, PA, the tiny town near Scranton where my maternal grandparents lived, tucked away up a steep road in the Appalachian mountains. I loved these trips, and the regular contact with relatives far away made me feel not-quite-midwestern, but not-quite-northeastern, either. Though my home was in Illinois, I never remember feeling completely owned by it, always aware of the fact that it is possible have roots all over.
These early road trips meant a lot to me. I loved the chance to go to a different place — to breathe different air, see new landscapes, and be someone just a little bit different. But I also loved the journey itself. My family became pros at the road trip: we would compile bags full of travel games, books, and magazines, load up a cooler with a picnic lunch (bologna and cheese with a mustard happy face, please), and crank up the oldies radio. We’d play wiffle ball at rest stops and splash in the hotel pool — no matter how rinky-dink. Though my brother and I would have our occasional backseat squabbles, and certainly, things went wrong, I can’t remember much of that now. My memories focus on the bliss of being on the road.
One of the things I loved best about traveling was what one might call roadside Americana: truck stops and rest areas; motels, hotels, and lodges; the people, signs, and oddities that flew by the window. When I was only six years old, we took the quintessential Americana road trip, a journey across the western U.S., taking in the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, the Corn Palace, Yellowstone National Park, and a multitude of other things I can’t specifically remember, but which left an impression on me. I recall a big horn sheep perched on the edge of a mountain, aisles of glorious kitsch at Wall Drug, the unfamiliar and thrilling sights, sounds, and smells.
The degree of adventure, however, was beside the point: We went a number of exciting places, like Walt Disney World and New York City, but I never lost my love for that familiar summer road trip, through the flat plains of Indiana to the Cross Country Inn in Toledo, Ohio to the quirky Appalachia of my parents’ hometowns. The trappings of the road were everywhere, and they were enough to satisfy me.
The Magic of Study Abroad
If those summer road trips were the first way travel changed my life, then the second was the semester I spent in Dublin, Ireland as a junior in college. I had been to Ireland once previously to visit my brother on his study abroad, and briefly to France on a class trip, but that had been the extent of my international travel. My semester in Dublin was a revelation. Difficult at first (and I should note that I wrote a whole essay about this experience for proFmagazine.com), the semester turned into the best of my life. I grew up that semester, came into my own, fell in love with my now-husband, and fell in love with both Ireland and Europe. After a period of poverty and graduate school (don’t they always go hand-in-hand), I was able to go back, and have since been lucky enough to travel more in Europe — particularly Italy.
I realize that my stories are not unique. There is something about travel, whether it’s a simple day trip or an international adventure, that quenches some essential human thirst — to understand the lives of others, to see the earth that we live in and exploit, to experience the truly novel, to feel uncomfortable and awed and like the most rock-solid version of oneself.
Why Write a Blog?
As a writer, I’d never before thought about writing a “travel blog” — one reason for this is that I never considered myself that much of a traveler. Sure, I traveled more than most people, but constricted as I was by a full-time job, I couldn’t be constantly on-the-go, nor could I spent long periods of time away from home. But in 2016, I realized it was time for a change, and transitioned from my full-time university job to a life of freelancing and teaching (more thoughts on that here). My husband is an Art History professor with summers free and many opportunities for travel, and we decided the small hit to our income was worth it for the sheer flexibility of my new career. And it has been 100% worth it, not least because I’ve made travel a central component of my life, and I haven’t looked back, traveling for work (teaching study abroad students), to visit friends and to simply see as much of the world as I can on my limited budget.
In Lieu of Postcards won’t necessarily be your typical travel blog, however. While I do travel frequently, my husband and I don’t live the #vanlife that’s so popular these days, that nomadic existence of life constantly on the road. We are middle-class people with jobs and responsibilities, after all. I see this blog as an outlet for my writing, not simply to document the places I’ve been and the experiences I’ve had there (though it will certainly be that). I’d like to explore travel and wanderlust more deeply, as states of mind. I plan to supplement the travelogue model (went here, did that) with investigations of the quirks of places I visit, their history, and the attendant pop cultural and literary associations that whirl around in my thoughts. I’m not a mountain climber, a gear-head, or much of a foodie (though like any traveler worth her salt, I appreciate good cuisine — and good puns), and you won’t see me striking meticulously glamorous poses or doing yoga on the edge of a cliff (spoiler alert: I fear cliff-edges). To summarize: I hope to write a blog that’s not just navel-gazing but thought-provoking, not aspirational (did I mention I don’t have much money?) but simply interesting — and perhaps occasionally inspirational — to readers out there who also love travel, whether it’s just a few hours or half a world away.
Did I scare you away with my long-winded thoughts? If not, I hope you’ll consider visiting me here from time to time, whenever that wanderlust mood strikes.