Gratitude for Travel

I wasn’t sure if I qualified.

I’ve been reading many stories about how people show gratitude for the gift of travel. Quite a few tell the love of travel was part of their childhood. Anne Bonfert, Janin Lyndovsky, Kathryn Lee, Jillian Amatt, and Sandy Maximus all travelled as children with their parents. Is the love of travel genetic or environmental? Maybe both.

I’ve never really thought that my travel as a child was anything out of the ordinary. My childhood wasn’t normal – is anyone’s? I’ve always known that. My parents split when I was 6. My father forcibly took my sister and I to live with his parents in a town an overnight train ride away. It was Christmas Eve. You can read that story here.

For the next four years with my grandparents, we only travelled by car to visit relatives. The roads were mostly dirt roads in Queensland in the fifties. I almost forgot. When I was 7, I did travel to Sydney with my grandparents but I have very little memory of the trip there — maybe it was by train because my grandad was a railway engine driver, but I remember we stayed in a downstairs flat in Bondi and went to Taronga Park Zoo.

My father remarried when I was 10 and I gained a stepmother and two stepbrothers. Our “ instant family” started to travel at least once every year and we often went on Sunday drives to different places. We had four road trips that I remember clearly. One to Gladstone for their honeymoon - us kids went too, one to Sydney where my (step)mother’s family lived, one to Melbourne where we stayed in a caravan in St Kilda Caravan Park and one to Cairns in far North Queensland stopping at Proserpine where we stayed in an old deserted farmhouse infested with rats and bats — it was free! It was on the farm where my uncle worked as a canecutter. At Airlie Beach we stayed in a house on the way back. I’m not sure who owned it. Friends of my father or uncle no doubt. In Cairns, we stayed with a former fiancée of my uncle who had never married. She had married a lovely man from Czechoslovakia.

Mostly we stayed in motels. The next year, we packed up and moved to Townsville. Thinking back, I remember I was the only one in my class at school who had ever left the state! So maybe we were a travelling family? I remember as a teenager wanting desperately to travel to Europe and specifically England. An English boy I really liked moved back to England and I promised him as soon as I finished my degree I’d be going to England. His surname was Stewart-Hunter. I can’t remember his Christian name. Isn’t that weird? Anyway, six kids and a few marriages later, aged 56, I first set foot on English soil.

My first husband was a real homebody and didn’t want to go anywhere – not even to the beach on a Sunday to fly a kite! But as soon as I packed my bags and left, the first chance he got, he started taking our three children on overseas holidays. Was it to make me jealous? If it was, it worked! For the ten years we were married we went nowhere. Now they’re jetting off to New Zealand, Norfolk Island, Lord Howe Island, Hawaii, Singapore and Hong Kong! By this time I had remarried and had another baby. I worked full-time teaching to pay the second mortgage. Even so, we were as poor as church mice. My three older kids were treated like princes and a princess on their holidays — only the best 5-star accommodation would do!

I had to bide my time. I did start to travel overseas with my husband in my forties. Mostly to Pacific Islands. We even took the three younger kids to Vanuatu and Disneyland in Anaheim. I won a family trip to NYC. Not until I was sixty and single did I have the opportunity to travel to Europe. You know the rest of the story. I became obsessed with Europe. All of it. There’s nowhere I haven’t loved!

But back to the gratitude. Maybe the travel bug has been in me my whole life but circumstances have kept it dormant. Maybe I have my family to thank for taking me on those long road and train trips when I was younger. Maybe I’m not so different to all of those who travelled as children. Five of my six kids love to travel. One just loves drugs more, but that’s a book on its own.

When Keeley, my youngest daughter met her now-husband, Carl, not only had he never been overseas, he’d never been on a plane or even out of the state and he only lived a couple of hours’ drive from the New South Wales border! Keeley has changed all that. Keeley took him to New York – his first overseas trip and his first flight! Since then he’s done two road trips around the US and holidayed in Thailand and toured China with Keeley. I dare say the travel bug has bitten him too.

I’m incredibly grateful that I’ve been able to travel as far and as wide as I have and that I have instilled that love of travelling into five of my children.

My eldest daughter Stacey has travelled the world three times and has been to countries I can only dream of seeing.

My youngest son Rowan is a tour operator currently in Budapest but living in Abu Dhabi. He took me on one of his tours to North Korea.

My eldest son Blair loves travelling to the US and cruising the Caribbean.

My youngest daughter has travelled with her father several times to the US and quite a few times to Vietnam after our divorce.

She’s travelled with me twice to Europe (best trip ever) and on a tour of China with Carl where she met her brother Rowan.

My middle daughter Lexi lived in Canada for a year and makes regular visits to Seattle. Her last trip was cancelled because of Covid and she’s become depressed and isolated. She rarely leaves the house but is seeing a psychiatrist. I am going to stop here. I was supposed to be writing about gratitude.

Even though I didn’t get to travel overseas as a child or teenager, I did travel interstate. I loved geography, history and French at school and loved learning about other countries. The desire to travel overseas lay dormant in me until I had the means to accomplish it. Having the means doesn’t mean having money (I’m a travel now-pay later sort of person) — it means the children had grown and the company I worked for from 2005 to 2018 gave me ten weeks’ unpaid leave from November to January — a perfect time to have a cold Christmas In Europe.

I am filled with gratitude that I have been able to see so much of the world that I only dreamed about for so long!

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