Magnets Tell My Travel Stories

Pictures of the world in my pocket

I wish I could be one of those people who buy expense paintings or lace or woodworkings while in foreign countries. I love to shop, and it would be great to decorate my house with fine things.

Alas, I have too much clutter to add anything more, and I can’t afford expensive souvenirs anyway. That’s why I turn to magnets. They’re small, can be found everywhere I travel, and still give me that zing of excitement when I look at them.

I bought my very first magnet while walking through the airport in Amsterdam. I was 18 years old, wide-eyed and on my first trip to Europe. My dad and I had just finished two weeks in the U.K. and Paris and had a several-hour layover in Amsterdam.

I was scared to leave the airport lest we miss our flight, but my dad insisted we explore. So we took the train to the city and went on a whirlwind walking tour. The tram cables and huge stone squares fascinated this country girl.

Back in the airport, I saw a souvenir stand and got the desperate urge to commemorate my visit, since I thought it was so cool that I’d unexpectedly ticked off another country on this trip. I picked out a flowery magnet in the shape of a wooden shoe that said “Holland.”

I don’t know where it is now, since it’s too heavy for my refrigerator and it’s disappeared into some corner of my house, but here are a few other magnets with stories behind them.

He may be bent and broken, but I love my Boston lobster. It was my senior year of college and I’d just re-joined the university pep band for the first time since sophomore year.

I quickly became enamored with it in a way I never had before. That was largely thanks to the new sophomore class, which contained lovely people with whom I became fast friends.

In winter 2007, the band went on an overnight road trip to Boston, where the basketball team had a game at Harvard. We had time to kill, so we ate at a market and walked around the shops.

To my delight, one shop sold just lobster items, including a ten-foot high stuffed lobster! (Stuffed animal, not an actual dead lobster.) Sadly, I couldn’t bring that home, so I settled for my lobster magnet, which brings me joy whenever I look at it.

My Rome magnet tells the story of the loss of another souvenir that I liked better.

At the end of my study abroad year in England, my dad came to help me pack up and bring my suitcases home (I had a lot of them). Before we left, we took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Every day I stood before the Forum, in awe at the crumbling chaos of its ruins. I loved to climb the Capitol Hill and look out down at the Forum as Cicero and Caesar would have done, feeling the power pulsing through the city.

Near the top of that hill is a replica of the statue of Romulus and Remus suckling from the she-wolf, as they did in the legend of the founding of Rome. Before I left, I bought a little metal copy of that statue, with the Rome magnet as an afterthought.

I loved my statue so much that I decided it would be the talisman I took with me wherever I traveled. Big mistake. The first time I voyaged with it in my backpack, the legs broke off from the pedestal.

I kept meaning to glue it back together, but now it’s lost. The magnet is all I have left from Rome.

Spring break of my senior year in college, I was sitting at home looking at pictures on Facebook and moping because my new pep band friends were spending time together without me.

The next year, I went on a Caribbean cruise with some of them! (Very sedate, no partying, because that’s how I roll.)

As an American completely focused on Europe for travel, I’d never imagined myself ever going to the Caribbean. My skin tingled with heat like I’d never known as we crossed endless blue waters to the Dominican Republic, U.S. Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, and the Bahamas.

In the Dominican Republic, I rode a 4-wheeler for the first time in my life — the speed of it was terrifying, because I was afraid I could fly off the vehicle at any moment — and saw extreme poverty of the type I’d only seen on the news.

I chose to buy a magnet with a map that read “The West Indies” because I couldn’t believe I was actually in this place I’d read about in history textbooks.

My mom came out to Philadelphia the week before my college graduation so that the two of us could go to New York City and Washington, D.C. She’d never been and I was excited to show her the sights.

In New York, I took her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I’d spent many a happy hour wandering with my notebook, writing down the musings and imaginings that the artworks sparked in my mind.

After the museum, we had to sprint many blocks to make it to a concert at Carnegie Hall. We went to Les Miserables during that trip, too. I remember that the goodness of Jean Valjean affected me deeply, and I resolved to change the way I lived so that I could be kind and charitable, too. It hasn’t worked out so well.

I bought this magnet because my mom and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge — something I’ve done with my friend Brooke since then, but which seemed like a mighty feat at the time. It was a hot day, and both my mom and I were sweaty and proud of ourselves after.

The year I was in graduate school in Scotland, I was desperately homesick, so much so that my mom came over twice that winter term to visit me. We could afford this because it was 2009, the heart of the recession, and airfares to Europe were cheap.

On her second visit, I took my mom to the Highlands, where we stayed in a Bed & Breakfast with a view of a mountain castle in the middle of a lake shining outside our window at night.

As a souvenir, I bought this magnet of the MacDonald clan. We are not MacDonalds, but we couldn’t find magnets of my mom’s maiden name, McCann, anywhere.

We looked it up and found that the MacCanns had been vassals of the MacDonalds, so I figured the MacDonalds are kind of family. I wanted to feel that family connection to Scotland which my Grandpa McCann had boasted of. He always used to joke that he had a castle somewhere.

My freshman and sophomore years of college in Philadelphia, I lived a cramped life, never daring to venture out of the city by myself.

But when I studied abroad in England, I became accustomed to taking trips out to the countryside, exploring as much as possible. I even took a solo train trip across France.

So when I returned to Philadelphia for my senior year, I wanted to keep up that spirit of discovery. I went to Princeton and New York City, I remember. But closer to home, I’d heard about Cliveden, the 18th-century home of the Chew family.

Now, I knew that I had some ancestors named Chew who’d lived in Philadelphia, so naturally I assumed it was the same family. So I pranced off to Cliveden, thoroughly enjoying this site of a Revolutionary War battle.

When I told my tour guide that I was descended from one of the Chew daughters, he asked me which one. I said, “Rebecca.” He gently informed me there’d been no Chew at Cliveden by that name.

Sigh. At least I got this cool magnet.

Thanks for reading, and thank you to the editors at Globetrotters (JoAnn Ryan, Anne Bonfert, Jillian Amatt — Artistic Voyages, Adrienne Beaumont, Michele Maize) for running such a great publication.

Here is the October “Souvenirs” Challenge:

I always love the images that accompany Globetrotters articles. Carol Labuzzetta, MS Natural Resources, MS Nursing took some beautiful nighttime photos of Budapest:

And Darren Weir’s story shares some gorgeous pictures of Paris: