Two Weeks to Lift-Off

In grad school, I had two opportunities to travel.  For various reasons, I didn't take advantage of those opportunities.  I continued to be an armchair traveler, reading about people and places I longed to visit one day.

But wait!  I don't mean that I have spent all of my life in one place!  I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.  Actually, I like to say that I grew up on the Mother Road, literally and figuratively.  Half a mile from my childhood house is Highway 66.  My grade school, 1-6, is on Highway 66.  The mall where we hung out is on Highway 66.  The drive-in was 66 Drive-in on—you guessed it—Highway 66.

My uncle was in the Navy, so my aunt, uncle, and cousins moved a lot.  My dad liked cars and driving.  Summers, we would get in the car and head west to California or east to Washington, D. C.  Most of our trips in the car were to visit family, and granted, not all involved driving down Highway 66, but all did involve driving in the car.  We traveled through most of the United States and through Quebec, Canada.

In my twenties, with the help of a friend, I drove to San Diego to stay.  My aunt and uncle encouraged me to come to where they had retired in order to go to college.  In the ensuing years, there were many trips in the car, some to new places like Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Baja, and others to old places like New Mexico.  Some places I couldn't drive to like Hawaii or didn't drive to like Washington state and  British Columbia.

You could say that traveling by driving a car is in my blood.  So deciding to drive for some of our travels in Australia was a no-brainer.  Our?  My nephew Trevor has been living and working in Australia since graduating college.  Australia and Egypt are two of the places I have dreamed about visiting—Egypt because I began my college studies in archeaology and anthropology; Australia because I ended up studying literature, Australian literature, in particular, via the films My Brilliant Career and Gallipoli. What better opportunity to go to Australia than while Trevor is there!


Trevor began traveling out of the United States at age 12(!) with People to People Student Ambassadors and as a member of the San Diego Children's Choir.  He has been to Australia twice before his current experience.  In 2003, my sister Tracy, her husband Lonnie, and the two boys, Spencer and Trevor, and I went to Paris for Spring Break.  At that time, of the five of us, only Trevor had travelled out of the country.  What an experience—the good and the bad!

Since then, I have been to France seven times.  I realized that I needed to, literally, broaden my horizons, so travels to Egypt, Florence, Italy, and Scotland have been sprinkled in between those trips to France.

So . . . in two weeks—as soon as this semester's classes are over, papers are graded, and grades are entered—I am off to the Land of Oz and travels with Trevor!