Do you like to travel?  On these cold winter days, it’s fun to think about faraway places and plan trips, even if only in our daydreams. 

I do have some trips on tap for the days ahead.  We’re making a quick trip to Missouri next month followed by a stay down in Florida. Then a sojourn to the United Kingdom is planned, with stays in Brighton and London. 

Once bitten by the travel bug, I have found it essential to my mental health to have a trip or two in the pipeline.  My first big trip was in college, when I flew to Amsterdam, Netherlands, to visit my Uncle Bob and Aunt Jonette.  They moved to the Netherlands in 1971 and I was only too happy to drop in.  As I recall, my round-trip student airfare was $216. Dad drove me down to the city and my Auntie Grey took me to the airport. I spent a glorious six weeks with Bob and Jonette at Brederodestraat 60, and years later, my husband John and I revisited their former apartment in a newly gentrified neighborhood. 

When I visited them, they had a water closet but no bathroom per se, so baths had to be taken in a large metal tub filled with hot water.  This worked great for my little cousins Bambi and Clifford, but it was rather a tight fit for yours truly. I went to a public bathhouse to take a proper shower. 

Also, they didn’t have a phone in the house that could make long-distance calls, so every time I wanted to call home and tell Mom and Dad that I wanted to stay one week longer, we had to go to a phone center to make those calls. 

Bob and Jonette showed me around Amsterdam, and soon I was able to make my way through the city on trams.  I was there so long I even began to pick up some of the language, though all I remember now is the opening of the evening news— “Goede avond, dames en heren.” (Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.) 

But I didn’t make it back to Europe until my daughter Liz and I went to Paris in August 2003 in the middle of a deadly heatwave.  The only time we could stand to be outside was early morning or late evening, but we did manage to travel to Versailles one day (by un-airconditioned train) and could only imagine how Marie Antionette and all those bewigged and begowned ladies managed in the summer.  We spent lots of time in our air-conditioned hotel room watching Euro-MTV.

John and I jumped the pond again in July 2005 and spent some time in London (a most confusing city to navigate) before taking the Eurostar to Paris where we met Liz and son-in-law Peter.  It was cooler (thank goodness) and we had a lovely time. Highlights of that trip included queues of Harry Potter fans waiting for the midnight release of “The Half-Blood Prince” and the tears of the Beefeater guard at our Tower of London tour, who thanked us for coming to London just after terrorists had bombed the subways (tube). 

Travel provides priceless memories.