Travel: for and against

I'm setting out on a Polish German tour

and then some family obligations and a bit of a vacation finally.

As a kid in New York, driving by JFK would make me happy. Adventure, departures, exotic lands, people, tastes and smells just a portal away. There were so many places I longed to visit. I have been to Paris, lived there even. That was top of the list.

There are places I am not going to visit in this lifetime that sounded so exotic and fantastic: Moscow, Istanbul, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Macchu Picchu, Thailand, Kauai. Mongolia. I still want to go to Moscow, Buenos Aires and Mongolia, the other places not so much.

Also my grandmother left to go back to Taiwan when I was eight on an airplane. I thought airplanes reunited people, but they separated them.

The pandemic kept us home and I liked that. For a while, I had a whole bit about being against travel. During the early aughts, when I traveled for work, I saw all these defense contractors traveling between Orange County and Houston and DC. It was gross: men with Tumi briefcases making millions of dollars providing air conditioning for the occupation.

I want to see people. I want to go to places I haven’t been in America. I am running out of time. I’ll post from the road.