I promised to share 50 of my most memorable travel moments. But life interfered. . .
These memories aren’t presented in any particular order. Nor do they carry a particular theme or lesson or emotion — they are simply some of the moments that have stayed with me over the years.
I hope you enjoy taking this little journey with me!
Memorable travel from around the USA
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1970: Christmas
Over Thanksgiving 1970, my mother took me and my brothers (three kids all under the age of 10) to the Twin Cities on a Christmas outing. With increasingly serious talk about the end of passenger rail service to our small town, my mother had decided we should ride on a train before they disappeared forever; Christmas in the city was simply a reason to make that trip.
My father was already in Minneapolis, so we met him downtown. My brother tells me we would have arrived at the long-gone Minneapolis Union Depot.
I don’t recall that, but I do recall the excitement of Christmas in a place so entirely different from my small town. It was exciting.
I clearly remember shopping at Dayton’s (the building houses Macy’s today) and Donaldson’s flagship stores and I still have the necklace I bought for myself at a glittering jewelry counter. These big department stores were glamorous and exotic places with mirrored walls and glittering decorations. They also had dramatic escalators. Despite never having seen one before, I made sure to swallow my fear and approach it as casually as all the other shoppers, as if I did this all the time. I’m sure I also pretended not to know my youngest brother, who initially viewed these moving stairways with sheer terror. I most definitely wanted people to think that I was sophisticated enough to belong in a place like this!
The rest of our time downtown is a blur of tall buildings and Christmas lights. All that has stayed with me is the sense of energy and excitement I felt, as if I were in at the heart of something so much bigger than myself. Looking back on it now, I realize that the downtown I saw on the trip – a downtown that was still the commercial and retail heart of the state – is gone. A surprising amount of it no longer even exists physically, either demolished or remodeled beyond recognition. But more importantly, the glamour is gone, as is the sense of being in the heart of everything. After years of disinvestment and ill-conceived redevelopment schemes, Minneapolis is again a vital, energetic city. But during those years the role of cities change and today it is a very different place than what it was in 1970. It has a different kind of energy these days. I’m not sure that is good or bad – it just is, but I’m really glad I got a taste of what cities were like once, before fear and crime and neglect took their toll.
We also took in a holiday show on that trip, attending the Ice Capades, which was doing a Disney-themed production that year. (A low-quality snippet of which is available below. It is the only evidence I’ve found indicating that there actually was an Ice Capades show in 1970.)
While I have a vague memory of this show, of swirling figures moving in deep darkness, what has firmly stuck in my memory is the group of black kids (a few about my own age) seated in the row just behind us.
A big fan of the TV show Julia, I was fascinated with black people, sure they would all be as interesting and fun as Julia’s son Corey on the TV show. Not having ever actually seen a black person, I was really looking forward to seeing some while we were in Minneapolis. Having these kids seated so near was both thrilling and terrifying – could I actually get up the nerve to talk to them? Fortunately for me, the dad accompanying these children must have seen my interest in them and had them share their popcorn with me. This started an exchange of treats and simple conversation. Thanks to him, I not only got to see black people, but got to meet some. That seems like a good first step in moving from TV-inspired stereotypes to actual understanding.
It was a good trip, a travel experience that let me learn a little about other people and places. Isn’t that why we travel?
I really appreciate the effort my mother put into bringing three little kids to the city.
Sanibel Island, Florida, 1976: Jimmy Carter becomes President
It is election day 1976. We are at the farthest point of our family road trip in the southern US, spending the night in our pop-up camper near the beach on Sanibel Island.Sometime during the night or the early hours of morning, the wind comes up as a storm moves through. Our light-weight camper shakes and shudders with every gust, performing a little dance in time to the crashing waves.
At some point in the middle of the night I awake. I’m not sure, however, what wakes me. Was it the sound of the wind and waves? Was it the camper’s jerky motion? Or was it the barely audible sound and flickering electronic glow of the miniature television that my mother had tucked into a corner of the camper for this trip.
My mother never was a big fan of camping and I think she tolerated our cross country trips more than she enjoyed them. Never a big fan of television, I suspect this one – a new acquisition in need of a trial run – accompanied us mostly as a way of keeping up with news as a tight presidential campaign wraps up. Now – nervous in storms anyway and already unconvinced of the safety of the camper – I suspect that she has turned to the television to take her mind off the dancing camper.
This is the first presidential election I’ve really noticed and, as a huge fan of Carter, it’s been disappointing to be too young to vote. I crawl out of bed and join her across the room, watching and waiting as the ballots are counted and the states are (ever so slowly) called until, finally, Jimmy Carter becomes the 39th President of the United States.
When I arise in the morning, the world is peaceful and calm under clear blue skies, the beach littered with beautiful shells. I am almost 16 and the future seems filled with hope.
NBC and ABC news called the election in Carter’s favor at 3:30 am (EST). CBS followed at 3:45 am. Carter defeated Gerald Ford by two percentage points in the popular vote, making it the closest presidential election since 1916 and one of the closest elections in American history.
NYC, 1987: Letting our imaginations run wild on Roosevelt Island
My 1987 visit to a friend in New York City included many memorable experiences: My first view of the city from the top of the Empire State Building (the World Trade Center was too new and gauche for my host, so I went there on a later trip); shopping for fabric in Garment District; cheering and jeering with the rest of the crowd during a showing of The Princess Bride (the original theater run) in the Village; marveling at the beauty and peace of Central Park; and laughing harder than I ever would have thought possible at the running commentary of my gay and redneck hosts as we watched the Miss America pageant. It was an amazing, if slightly surreal, trip.
Most surreal of all was the afternoon we spent on Roosevelt Island.
In those days there wasn’t much happening on Roosevelt Island. The island was being redeveloped for residential use, but much of it was still vacant. Large weedy fields sprouted fences to keep the few people who ventured there far from the long-boarded up buildings that once housed facilities for prisoners, the mentally ill, and others the city wanted kept far from the general population. But even the new mixed-use residential areas were largely deserted, as they served a population that abandoned this island every day to work elsewhere. When we arrived – mid afternoon on a sunny week day – it was, literally, deserted. The glimmering towers of Manhattan looked very far away, unreal, and equally without evidence of human activity.
(Manhattan from the river in 1987, probably taken on our way to Roosevelt Island)
Adding to the oddity of being in a place where there were plenty of signs of human activity, but no humans to be seen, was that all the new buildings were built in the same blocky style, using the same brick, with identical plain signs that identified the use (“Drug Store” or “Restaurant”) without any names, graphics or further explanation.
It felt like we had stumbled into an Orwellian dystopia.
Pretty soon our imaginations took over: Clearly, we were the last survivors of a traumatic event that removed all other humans from earth. We had escaped to this island, but we needed to avoid detection, as any “humans” we might come across were likely alien imposters and part of the evil plot that had emptied out the shimmering city across the river. Obviously they were establishing their new world order here and it was a soulless world devoid of art, humor or human warmth.
We spent the entire afternoon exploring the island in the warm fall sunshine, conducting reconnaissance, and occasionally ducking out of sight to avoid detection.
It was a blast to just play, amazing to be so close to the city and yet so completely on our own.
The world has changed so much since that day.
Thank you, Richard. I still think of you and miss you.
Mount Rainier, Washington 1990: Hiking to Tolmie Peak Lookout
My college roommate got married in Seattle in 1990. Having significantly less time off than her new spouse, her new spouse was charged with entertaining me, his sister, and her friend. Since he was a serious hiker (the kind who goes out every weekend and tackles a different mountain trail and never brings a camera because the scenery isn’t the point), he decided to take us on one his favorite hikes on Mount Rainier.
Keep in mind that I only hike for the photo ops and his sister and friend – visiting from England – very likely spend most of their time hiking around the local shops at home. They certainly weren’t used to hiking up a mountainside, especially at 5000 feet. (Neither was I.) But he insisted and soon we were on the Tolmie Peak Lookout/Eunice Lake Trail.
This was the first week of August and there were flowers everywhere, masses of them in brilliant Crayola colors. I’d never seen anything like it – had never even imagined anything like it.
Eunice Lake was beautiful, still and calm in the hot sun, but there were a few mosquitos. They weren’t too bad, but my British companions – including the instigator of this hike — weren’t used to mosquitos and found them dreadfully unpleasant. I believe a bit of unpleasant language and a fair amount of violence (directed at the mosquitos) occurred.
Well, some of the unpleasant language might have ben directed at our guide, as from here we could see our destination: the Tolmie Peak Fire Lookout.
He had to be nuts. There was no way we’d be able to hike all the way up there!
But he kept pushing us along on what sometimes seemed like a forced march into the wilderness, prodding us along almost every step of the way, encouraging us to keep moving and frustrated that we were so slow. He did pause occasionally to ask us if we were enjoying the scenery, to which his sister replied: “I feel like I’m on a train, with the scenery whizzing past.”
Exactly.
Actually, he did stop occasionally to take a break, probably so none of us got too far behind. Once the last of us (usually me, since I kept stopping to take pictures) reached his shady resting spot, the break was over. Time to hike some more! Isn’t this fun!?
But it was stunningly beautiful (the lake, the mountains, all those flowers!) and we did have a wonderful sense of accomplishment when we reached the lookout tower. . . or maybe we were simply lightheaded from exhaustion and the altitude.
At any rate, at the lookout tower we had a chance to rest, eat lunch, and savor our accomplishment . . . at least until the young woman with the child on her shoulders bounded past us, barely breathing hard. Maybe this shouldn’t have seemed so hard.
At least we had amazing scenery to distract us from the fact that we would soon need to begin the hike back.
This was the first time I’d ever really spent any time hiking in the mountains and I was amazed by the beauty and, especially, by the flowers. I had never imagined that there was a place where flowers grew in wild glorious abundance like this. (Wild flowers in Minnesota tend to be shy, timid things; beautiful, but dainty and delicate.) I was stunned by Mother Nature’s display here and I’ve been on a search for its equal ever since.
It was a truly delightful, if exhausting, day. And all my hiking companions survived their mosquito bites and lived to tackle our next (non-hiking) adventure the following day.
Northern Minnesota 1999 and more: Blueberries with Joyce and Jerry
We missed blueberry season this year.
Blueberries weren’t something I grew up with – they didn’t grow where I lived and my mother remembered hours bent over low-lying blueberry bushes amid cloud of mosquitoes when she was growing up. Despite her fondness for these delicate blue fruits, the experience of picking them wasn’t something she felt compelled to relive or impose upon the rest of us.
As an adult, I’d casually pick a berry or two to eat out of hand when out with friends, but I’d never gone out with the aim of filling pails with them until we joined our friends Joyce and Jerry on Palisade Head one summer.
Palisade is an exposed chunk of rock high above Lake Superior. The blueberries here are continually battered by sun and wind, like fine wine grapes, they suffer. This means they are small (and very close to the ground), but absolutely delicious. Perhaps most importantly, we were there with friends on a beautiful day and every time I looked up I had sweeping views over Lake Superior to Shovel Point.
(This picture is from a fall trip, but you get the idea: It is a gorgeous spot.)
Back at their home, we ate a simple dinner of fresh berries, smoked salmon, good cheese, chips with homemade salsa, and blueberry pie.
What could be better – aside from the opportunity to relive this experience periodically throughout the years and various blueberry patches?
(Thanks, you two. We miss you.)
Memorable travel moments in Europe
Western Sweden 1983: Connecting with my family in Sweden
On my first trip to Europe in college, I was able to leave the group for a few days to meet my Swedish relatives. It was one of the highlights of the trip and led to a long-lasting, if sometime on-and-off, relationship with my second cousins.
When I first broached the idea of meeting my Swedish relatives, neither my dad nor aunt (both of whom had made their own trips to Sweden to visit relatives many years before) thought it would be worthwhile.
“They are all old now and most of them don’t speak English.”
“But,” I protested, “There must be some who are younger. Didn’t any of them have kids?”
“Their kids were all little.”
“But that was in 1960 something. Wouldn’t that mean that those kids are my age?”
My aunt considered that for a while finally admitting that I was right. From that point forward, she was all supportive helpfulness. The contact information she gave me (in those years before email and Facebook) eventually yielded a response – in English – from a pair of female cousins almost exactly my age.
We meet at last!
So I left my group behind in Copenhagen and boarded the hydrofoil for Malmo to meet my Swedish cousins. That visit was a whirlwind of meals with what seemed like a multitude of relatives of all ages, including an elderly aunt who gave me a wedding picture from my grandfather’s wedding. It also included time spent with just the two girls my own age – girls with lives that were both similar and vastly different from my own. Had my grandfather never left, I would have grown up with these girls and their lives might be mine as well.
Besides meeting family, I got to see the landscape and architecture associated with his life here, including a house he lived in while growing up. I wandered through the same fields where he worked, in a place little changed from when he had been there 60 years before.
I felt an almost physical connection to this land, not a sensation I was expecting.
Long Sand Beach
Among the most memorable moments was a visit to the ocean, where I immediately recognized the rocky headland and ancient beach shack from my father’s pictures of the same spot during his own visit many years earlier. It was as if I had been here before.
For me, it has become a touchstone of sorts, a place I try to visit whenever I return to Sweden in order to wander the shore with my Swedish family, to live again, for a few moments, the life I might have lived if my grandfather had not left this place all those years ago.
Touring the north of the island of Ireland 2004
As a birthday present to ourselves, my college roommate and I traveled around the northern half of Ireland in the early spring, spending our time in Northern Ireland (Ulster) and the counties of Dublin, Louth, Meath, Cavan, and Donegal in the Republic.
We started out with a general itinerary, but almost no hotel reservations, allowing us a lot of freedom. It was a wonderful trip, filled with great memories. Here is a taste.
Our adventure started right at the airport, where the young man at the car rental counter offered to upgrade me to a brand new manual transmission vehicle.
“I’m sorry, but I reserved an automatic.”
“You don’t want one. The automatics are all bad – they are old and beat up. This car is new, bigger, and much nicer.”
“I’m in IRELAND. I need an automatic.”
“You drive a manual at home, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but. . .”
“Well, then you can drive one here.”
“But everything is on the other side!”
“You’ll get used to it. It’s easy. You can practice in the parking lot.”
My girlfriend didn’t drive a manual even at home, so she wasn’t about to drive one here, so in saying yes I was committing myself to doing all of the driving during this trip. But the car was brand new and beautiful, with about 200 miles on it.
By the end of the trip I mostly liked driving in Ireland, although I’m not sure my friend ever felt comfortable in the passenger’s seat (those hedgerows must have seemed awfully close). I was lucky in that she was used traveling in England, kept up a mantra that went “to the left, to the left, to the left. . . .” My own internal tune was “driver in the middle, driver in the middle” as in “the driver is always in the middle of the road,” which is also a handy thing to remember when returning home after a driving trip in Ireland!
Rhododendrons
The rhododendrons were in bloom while we were in Ireland, But not rhododendron bushes like we have at home. These were huge trees full of flowers.
I’d never seen anything like it before and wandered about both Castlewellan and Mount Stewart Gardens in a bit of a daze. It was simply glorious.
(And then there were those fields of daffodils!)
Gale force winds at the Giant’s Causeway
Having spent too much time hiking in the Glens of Antrim (where we went from hot sun to rain, snow, sleet and hail over the course of 20 minutes), we ended up at the Giant’s Causeway late in the afternoon.
The sun was blindingly bright, but the wind was howling and I was really sick of driving (as noted above, my friend can’t drive a manual). We could tell we wouldn’t be going out to the Giant’s Causeway, so our attention turned to where we would spend the night. My vote was “right here.”
There was lodging near the Causeway, in a huge old ramshackle inn, but it wasn’t cheap. It was memorable though. The whole building shuddered and shook when hit by a particularly strong gust. You could hear the shutters rattling in every room and rain and sleet slammed against our window all night. It was like the setting of a Gothic novel come to life.
“The talk”
Having spent our first three nights in evocative, but rather expensive, lodgings and eating incredible, but rather expensive, meals – my friend sat me down for a little talk.
She started: “I’ve been spending quite a bit more money than I budgeted.”
“Yeah, me too.”
There was a long silence as we considered each other. I knew she was right and that we needed to start being more frugal. I just didn’t want to.
Finally she said, “I think I’m worth it, how about you?”
Ranger Kennedy
The city of Derry has wonderful solid walls around much of it, walls perfect for walking, so that is where we started our tour of the city.
My friend knew much, much more about The Troubles than I did, so she understood what we were seeing, explaining to me that the modest neighborhood below us was Bogside, the heart of the Catholic community in what has historically been one of Ireland’s most religiously polarized cities. Even without knowing much about that history, its weight seemed tangible – sad and heavy. We spoke quietly, our voices dropping lower and lower to avoid being overheard. We weren’t sure it was ok to even talk about that history – it hadn’t come up anywhere, in any conversation – and now an older man was pacing just behind us, watching us, perhaps listening in.
Uncomfortable with feeling we were being watched, we decided to move on. Of course, I was slow to actually move, since I had to take a picture first. As my friend walked away, that older gentleman walked up and greeted me.
I tried to evade him, but he reached out and pushed a scrap of paper at me. And I do mean a scrap. It was poorly photocopied and folded into about a 2” square.
“This explains the real meaning of the coat of arms of Derry. You can’t get this from anyone else.”
Oh oh. What kind of a wacko have I run into? I shot my friend a panicked look – help me escape! He must have seen it too, because at that point he introduced himself. I didn’t catch his name (that lovely Irish brogue!), but I did understand he worked for the city of Derry and immediately everything was fine. I’m a city planner by training, so anyone with the city had to be ok. Besides, someone with the title City Ranger might be able to answer my questions!
We were fully engaged in conversation by the time my friend cautiously came over to figure out was going on. The three of us spent the rest of the morning walking the wall and wandering the city streets. In the process I learned more than I ever could have hoped to from this knowledgeable and engaging man.
There were a few (a very few) other people on the wall that morning. I have no idea why he selected us to approach, but I’m so glad he did. . . and glad that the concept “city employee” sunk in enough to overcome my fear of a stranger.
The Book of Kells
I love illuminations and was really looking forward to finally seeing the Book of Kells for myself. I was not disappointed – it was even more beautiful than I had expected it to be and was housed in a gorgeous, informative exhibit space. I’m not sure which astounds me more: the effort and artistry that went into the creation of the book itself or the fact that this fragile artifact has survived to create a physical connection to an ancient time. It’s so human.
I wished I could have seen more than four pages, but that is an incentive to return to Dublin regularly.
(Graves in a ruined abbey in County Cavan)
Moscow, Russia, 1983: Red Square and Saint Basil’s Cathedral
I first went to Europe in college as part of seminar studying war and peace. Our long list of stops in Western Europe also included a few days behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet cities of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow.Remembering Moscow’s Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral
To celebrate our first evening in Moscow, a group of us had tickets to see the Kirov Ballet perform at what I am guessing was the Kremlin Palace (rather than at the grander Bolshoi Theater). Our plans were quickly put into question with the news that Soviet Party leader had died and that Red Square and much of the surrounding area was closed, with no idea of when it would reopen to the public. Several phone calls were required to confirm that access to the theater would be allowed for the evening’s performance.
While that was good news, I was disappointed to hear that access to the famous square would be restricted. Saint Basil’s Cathedral was the number one item on my Moscow must-see list. Would I even get to see the famous church?
That evening the ballet was entrancing; it was a couple hours of pure magic.
Later, in the crush of people leaving after the performance, we lost track of where we had entered the theater. Having no idea where to go, we simply followed the crowd through the nearest exit and into the semi-daylight of a spring night in Russia. As the flow of people began to subside, we began to look around and more closely consider where we were.
The street had become part of a broad plaza of sorts. Recognition came slowly, but finally someone said it. “We’re in Red Square.” While not sure how this had come to be, it was clear that she was right: There was the Kremlin’s wall with its glowing star, the cobblestone courtyard before use rose slightly as it broadened into a large square, and there, at the far end, were the distinctive towers of Saint Basil’s.
Giddy with excitement, we raced across the square.
I was Dorothy rushing to Oz, the twisted Technicolor towers beckoning from the end of a brick plaza with painted yellow stripes.
The church was every bit as wonderful as I hoped it to be, perhaps in part because of the unexpectedness of my encounter with it.
Talk about the magic of a Russian night!
Memorable travel moments in Africa
The Nile from My Deck, Cairo, Egypt, 2007
I went on a college alumni tour to Egypt – without my husband – in 2007. Despite being on my own, I quickly became part of the “singles club,” a revolving group of us who were traveling on our own. Each night one of us would either take a bottle of wine from our private stash (we hit the liquor store at the airport on our way into the country) or would order an extra bottle at dinner to take up to our nightly after dinner gathering.
In Cairo, we ended each night on the deck outside my hotel room, with the Nile, far below us.
It was amazing to sit out there, suspended far above the street in the calm evening air, the sounds of the city swelling up and around us. The dinner barges that ply the Nile would slowly move past, sound blasting toward us as each passed by as if in competition with the sounds of the street. . . and then the call to prayer would begin, the broadcast song of dozens of muezzins growing in strength and complexity as it rose from all across the city.
At that time, Cairo was the loudest city in the world, (maybe it still is.) but from my perch high above the street, that was the sound of the exotic music of a magical city.
We stayed at the Nile Hilton (which I’m guessing is now the Hilton Conrad Cairo), an older hotel very near the Egyptian Museum and Tahrir square. It was a fabulous place to stay and I hope to go back some day.
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Pretty soon our imaginations took over: Clearly, we were the last survivors of a traumatic event that removed all other humans from earth. We had escaped to this island, but we needed to avoid detection, as any “humans” we might come across were likely alien imposters and part of the evil plot that had emptied out the shimmering city across the river. Obviously they were establishing their new world order here and it was a soulless world devoid of art, humor or human warmth.
The rhododendrons were in bloom while we were in Ireland, But not rhododendron bushes like we have at home. These were huge trees full of flowers.
Oh, oh. It's April – I should be close to half-way through by now! There is still much more to come. . .