My kids are great travelers.
My daughter is in Ecuador for the summer: a college service project at 11,700 feet elevation and then some beach touring. Her boyfriend is river rafting in Peru, then they will meet up and visit our Ecuadorian exchange student (Thanks, Cupertino Rotary!) and her family in Cuenca.
My son just got home from a year in Germany, where he lived with a friend I met when she was a Youth For Understanding exchange student at Monta Vista High School (1975-76). My "boy" and I drove around this morning (donuts and a hair cut) and he noticed all the small differences: okay to turn right on a red light, bigger cars, wider streets. The new PED XING sign at the corner of Bubb and McClellan.
I'm reminded today, thinking about my traveling children, of Walt Whitman's great poem, "Song of the Open Road." The last stanza is one of my favorite stanzas in poetry.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
Read the rest here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178711
Traveling is really about giving yourself to the world, and to the people you meet. I'm glad when my kids come home, but I'm proud of their spirits and the adventures they find -- and the people who will "stick to them" as long as they live that they are meeting along their journeys.
