As a rule, I don’t do road trips. I’m not sure that my professional responsibilities are best served by driving along America’s backroads, when I could be checking out the price of a Bellini at Harry’s Bar in Venice.
Having been birthed in Brooklyn, educated at an American Indian college in the south, employed in Washington D.C. and voluntarily ensconced in Northern California, I felt that I had been exposed to what I needed to see in the United States. Just to be certain, I drove coast to coast a few times.
There is mostly nothing there. Brooklyn was a blur but it was a blur filled with magnetic fields of energy. My biggest regret is that I never got to have a steak at Peter Lugar’s.
My time in the south, living in a trailer some twenty feet away from the Atlantic Coastline train tracks was so filled with extraordinary events that I don’t talk about it much since it would all sound like so much exaggeration. My college hang-out was the all-night laundry and the only travel I did was to visit Miss Ruby the bootlegger and her pack of mean dogs, and the occasional foray to nearby Dillon, South Carolina to dine, if that’s the right word, at South of the Border right off Interstate 95.
In Washington D.C. I came to know that road trips can be as much fun as plane trips. In an hour you could be in three very different states, whatever mood suited you. The DC area is one of the nation’s best travel buffet tables and it helped me appreciate the client who says “this year I think we’re just going to travel locally.”
San Francisco made me tear up. I wondered how I came to be fortunate enough to live there and to watch the sun coming up over the Marin headlands at the start of each new day.
I love sending clients to the Pushkar Camel Fair in Rajasthan. But, if truth be known, I still get a charge out of sending first-timers to San Francisco and Napa. And I always recommend that they journey out to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge walkway and look out to sea.
Still in my twenties, I set out to see what I could of the world, resorting to long weekends in Paris or anywhere I could connect using Icelandic Airlines. I lived in Tuscany for several years and decided I would live a life of travel.
My master plan was that I would save the United States and long weekends for the day I hit seventy-five. To celebrate my birthday, the plan went,, Angela and I would criss-cross the back roads of America in search of authentic local lunches. I suppose I didn’t calculate that to actually make that kind of journey at seventy-five, we would need to invite my Cardiologist and an Internist to join us in the back seat.
I fell in love with a woman who, more or less, shared my desire to explore the planet before we couldn’t any longer. And that’s how we came to spend the last several decades with a suitcase always packed in the hall closet.
But then something happened to change our master plan. Something happened that led us to put some of the planet on hold, replaced by stops at Stuckey’s and Kingdoms ruled by large rodents in black pumps. Our daughter came into our life and we had to re-examine the whole concept of travel within the United States.
Oh we still get out there and my daughter, now six, is a frequent flyer with two international carriers. But we don’t shoot off to Marrakesh for a long weekend and we no longer think about going off to Knightsbridge just to see if Gordon Ramsey is still on his game.
I have been guilty of a certain level of snobbery when it comes to travel within my own country. For many years, our firm would only assist our very best clients with arrangements outside the United States.
“We handle International travel exclusively” was what we would say.
I suppose there were a few reasons why we took that position. To start with, I’m not really comfortable helping someone who really doesn’t need my help. It is easy enough to book domestic travel on the internet and all of my best connections are located abroad. I wasn’t sure I could bring much to the table. And I really wouldn’t know how to respond if a client asked me what there was to do in Omaha at night.
But there was another reason I shied away from domestic travel planning. And that has to do with my feeling that we are seeing a dumbing down of the population which is accompanied by a growing trend toward sticking it out at home. We’ve become like squirrels, who never venture more than a quarter of a mile away from home.
Seventy percent of us do not have a passport. In some small way, I’ve always thought I should be a warrior in that battle. I’ve always felt an obligation, a pull, to get those sitting on the fence of curiosity to go out and see a bit of the world.
But now, I see some things changing . I see a lifetime of attempts to see and understand some of this planet disappearing as a little girl with beautiful brown eyes looks at me and asks “Daddy when are we going to visit Mickey.”?
“Soon”, I answer, “very soon”.
