Deborama’s Travels - Cool, amazing, whimsical or mystical places I have travelled to — Part 1

Childhood When I was a girl, we went on road trips. Once, maybe twice, we flew to Pittsburgh, near to where the rest of the family lived back then. But mostly we drove, or sometimes in the summer we would all go with my Dad on his sales trips through the southeast or we would just go on a family vacation, camping or staying at Howard Johnsons. The most memorable ones were around the Appalachians — the Great Smokies in Tennessee, the Blue Ridge in North Carolina and Virginia, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. From one vacation, I vividly remember the Natural Bridge in Virginia. Note how tiny the guy standing under it is.

I remember one year we were in Pigeon Forge, TN for Easter. I only remember this because there is a picture. But it’s a picture of our Easter finery and a pretty, sunny day, not a picture of the majestic beauty of the surrounding Great Smoky Mountains. Unfortunately, Pigeon Forge today is so tacky and commercial that there literally is no decent picture of it. So here’s a picture of the mountains a few miles away.

And this is Ohiopyle. I visited this wild and beautiful place at the age of 14 with my Aunt Nancy, who was 16, and a distant male cousin, age 19, whose name I have forgotten. Which is really rotten, because I very nearly died at this very spot, and he saved me. It looks kind of tame in the picture, but trust me, it isn’t.

In 1969, a life altering experience… When I was 16, in the summer between junior and senior year, I had the life-determining experience of an eight-week long tour of Europe, with a strong cultural emphasis and classes in art, history and politics, taught by university professors.

I had led a very sheltered, family-centered life up to then, and I could hardly believe my parents either permitted me or could scratch together the dough for me to take this trip. But it really did set the course of the rest of my life, for good or ill.

The first place we landed was Rome. Within the first week I saw Michelangelo’s Pieta. This was three years before Laszlo Toth smashed it with a hammer, requiring extensive restoration. I was enthralled.

Many of the other students on the trip were Catholic, and I was a member of a Catholic Girl Scout troop and had Catholic friends. But I was raised a pious Methodist, and knew nothing of Mariology, or any of the mystical threads of Christianity.

But I was riveted by the Pieta, and sketched it for several hours, and would have spent another week or two just hanging around it if I could have. I am sure it is a tinder spark to my later obsessive interest in the more exotic threads of Christian theology. I was already obsessed with art, and at the time probably thought my whole interest was simply aesthetic, and then that thing that John Wesley said about one’s heart being strangely warmed.

From Italy we went on to Austria, with side trips to Southern Germany.

One of the many day trips was to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany. I visited it again on my honeymoon at age 19. This is the usual tourist eye-candy shot, but my favorite part was actually the kitchen.

(When I returned to the Germanophone countries with my Germanophile first husband on a honeymoon in 1973, we stayed in the same tiny village (Itter, or Itterdorfl) that my classmates and I stayed in in 1969. )

We visited many, many chapels and cathedrals on the European study tour. Through Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland, and ending our trip with eight days based in the famous English pilgrimage destination of Canterbury.

One of the few I remember by name is Chartres, or the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Chartres, as it is properly known. Unfortunately, I remember only a little about it. I had totally forgotten about the Labyrinth! I have a wispy visual memory of the Rose Window, which can be teased to life by a good photo of it.

Young adulthood — not much money or time for travel In 1970, after high school graduation, I moved to downtown Atlanta to attend Georgia State University. I mostly lived around what is now called Midtown Atlanta, but it was very different back then.

One memorable trip was a three-day, three-girl road trip to St. Simons Island, GA, in a red VW bug with very little money but lots of excellent weed and a few bottles of Boones Farm Wine. (Yes, we were all underage at the time.) I remember being very stoned at night, super conscious of perching at the edge of a large continent, at the mercy of the sea. And then seeing the sun rise over the sparkling, surging Atlantic.

But for this insane honeymoon in the autumn of 1973 Insane because we had no money to speak of, but my new bridegroom had a pathological love of German-speaking Europe and a new Bankamericard. Two weeks in Europe, including Munich for Oktoberfest, his old buddies from his recent Army stint, who all turned out to be crypto-Nazis, revisiting my little village of Itter, Austria.

And the highlight for me, three days in Vienna! I loved Vienna so much, and it’s another city I have longed to revisit all my life. Here’s a view along the Ringstrasse, where all the fab Fin de Siecle buildings can be seen from the tram.

While exploring the Ringstrasse, with no map or plan, I stumbled across a 200 year old, tall and forbidding, building inscribed “Thurn und Taxis” across its front, which gave me an out-of-body experience because up to that point, I had thought that Thomas Pynchon made them up.

We also visited a nearby village in Austria called Kiefersfelden (my family name is Keefer.))

Road trip to the Rockies, Montana, & Yellowstone — 1974

Still in debt from the honeymoon, we then proceeded to further doom our marriage by taking a two-week vacation in the summer of 1974 to go visit our mutual friend and my pre-marriage room-mate, Esther, who had moved back to her aging parents’ ranch near Bozeman, Montana. We stayed with her for a while, either before or after touring the Rockies in Colorado, and camping overnight in Yellowstone Park. It was my only trip to the western states.

We had a baby daughter in 1975, and then divorced in 1977. I went back to school to finish my degree. I met and fell in love with my second husband on a student job in the Southern Labor Archives. We married in 1978 and had a child together in 1979. We visited Washington DC, where his parents lived at the time, in 1980. I have many fond memories of that short trip.

During my second marriage, 1978–1983

We took this trip on the train, the northern half of the route called The Southern Crescent. Our son loved trains, even though he was only seven months old. But sadly, he was struck with a tummy bug of some kind soon after the train departed Atlanta. It was an exhausting trip for us parents. But as soon as we arrived in DC, he was fine, alert and smiling, and charming the sox off his newly met paternal grandparents. One of the day outings we made while there was to the Smithsonian Institute.

For a second trip, in 1982, I seem to recall, we visited my husband’s cousin in or near Hartford Connecticut and also his maternal grandmother in New Rochelle NY. While in Hartford, we all (the whole family) had a very memorable visit to Mark Twain’s home.

My ex’s aunt (his mother’s younger sister) was working for and in a long-time relationship with a NYC-based legislator of some sort, either a Congress member or the state legislature, I can’t remember. But this gentleman was of Italian descent and treated us all to a family-style feast at his favorite restaurant in Little Italy. Which I don’t remember or I would show a picture if it happened to still exist.

Sadly, this marriage too broke up. We divorced in 1984, after I had already moved to Minneapolis. By this time I had got my degree in 1979 and had started a career in IT in 1980. My last job in Atlanta, 1983–84, was for a cooperative food warehouse called Magnolia (no longer in business.) I desperately needed to get out of Dodge, because of unhealthy social connections etc. I chose the Twin Cities in Minnesota because it was and still is “co-op central,” the metro area with by far the most food co-ops and worker-owned cooperatives in the US.

The Minneapolis Years, Part I — 1984 to 1994 However, I did not get a job in a co-op, but rather for a company that employed contract programmers on a proper payroll. I made a lot of friends and had a lot of interesting assignments, but I didn’t make very much money and life was a struggle for most of that time. I did a little travelling but was mostly in that midlife trap where you either have money or time, but never both! A lot of this time I worked in downtown St. Paul, with a long bus commute.

For the first few years, living in a new state with a new culture was a form of travel in itself. I did have a couple of short breaks to various local areas. “Going to the lake” was the family cabin of the minister of the radical Methodist Church I joined in 1985. The lake was Grindstone Lake. I also had brief trips to Duluth and Stillwater, popular short break destinations.

The second half of my amazing travels will be published shortly in Part 2.

A shorter version of this piece was previously published at deboramasweblog.blogspot.com/p/cool-amazing-whimsical-or-mystical.html#.YbD5271MGjt