This week we are going on vacation – vacation back “home” where we will do the round and make the visits and somehow try to make it not seem as exhausting as I think it will end up being. This might seem common. People all over the world go “back” to somewhere and visit their homes. This year however will differ in that we will go up and down the Eastern Seaboard – family and friends on on the list, and my intentions are to try to keep these extraordinary memories alive for my daughter.
Since we moved abroad our travel has increased exponentially. While visiting new and faraway places was always on the top of my list, so many of the places I deemed most exotic were too faraway. Those places – India, Vietnam, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Thailand, are all now within a 6-7 hour flight. They are significantly closer than the US and within only a few time zones. But our family is in the US, and so that is where we go. We go to build upon the memories we ourselves have from own childhoods so that we can pass them on to our daughter. I full recognize that what she is experiencing is far different than what I myself experienced growing up, however every time she is back in the US I try to give her a small piece of what I once had. I want her to know about sweet summer corn on the cob. I want her to pick strawberries, and dip her feet into the frigid Atlantic Ocean. I want her to taste clam chowder and lobster rolls and Dell’s Lemonade, and I will try to do all of this in 10 days time. And then at the end we will get on a 12 hour flight and cross several ocean and times zones and eventually land in the sand swept desserts of the UAE. It will all seem like it happened entirely too quickly, but in my heart I will know it made an impression. Each and every single one of these trip that will help to shape the person she is becoming and these are by far the greatest gifts we can give her, and there is nothing common about that at all.
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