Glennalicious

« Aloha | Main | Lennon, snow, and bronchitis »

December 02, 2003

Lusting and wandering

The wanderlust started when we were kids. My dad owns a cattle feedlot construction company, and we were always traveling. We lived in every state west of the Mississippi at least for a few months. If we weren’t moving to a new town at the end of a job, we were constantly flying in our family plane to some new place for vacation. Some of my earliest memories are of aircraft, usually connected to memories of my equilibrium-challenged sister barfing. We flew everywhere, with me perched on the suitcases, Debbie reading a book, Bonnie barfing.

Trips with my family are filled with crazy wonderful weird memories. Our dog Missy floating in the air inside the airplane, trying to use canine reasoning to find gravity. My dad calling down the moose from the mountains in Wyoming, biking down Haleakala Crater in Hawaii, learning to scuba dive in Cozumel before it became touristy, my guinea pig dying of heat stroke in Kansas, my sister barfing in my lap as we flew sideways next to the Grand Tetons. Sitting under the stars at the cabin in the mountains of NM, just seeing the tapestry unfold above, wind sighing in the pines, steaming cocoa in your hands.

My mom really wasn’t exactly a traveler, as she was the one who had to do all the grunt work for the big moves. Her family basically got all their moving out of their collective system when they moved from England to the Jamestown colony in 1607. After that they stayed in one place for about 300 years. She loves traveling to Mexico now, but I don’t think she ever really enjoyed most of the trips. Dad would tell us we were going to Yellowstone…right now. My mom was the one that had to pull us out of school, get everything packed, and sort out the details. Dad was the idea man. Good ideas, but I know that mom would have probably been just as happy staying in one place.

I also remember just flying with my dad from state to state. We would have multiple jobs in different states, and I would get to fly with him. Some times it was fun, usually it was me drowsing in the truck waiting for him to finish investigating udder rot. The flying was a fun skill that my dad taught to me. I remember discussing with him the reasoning behind the autopilot system, the gyroscopes, the St. Elmo’s fire. He bought a stunt plane when we lived in Nebraska that had a glass roof and floor, and we would fly to the jobsite upside down. I learned to do rolls, loops, and would get to buzz our town (this was in 4th grade).

I’m afraid I’m a mix of both parents. I like having a place I can call home, but not for too long. I love going to new places, but I would prefer to have a plan. I’m enough like my dad that I often enjoy just roaming. Once I was living on my own, I loved driving across the great undeveloped swaths of the southwest. Stopping in at tiny little state parks, driving through the windmill valley in California, getting lost in Los Angeles. Climbing the tallest peaks in NM, spelunking in the new caverns at Carlsbad with research teams, rafting down four of the highest ranked rivers in the US. Whipping through the s-curves in the Salt River canyon, picking up wildly crazy hitchhikers in Louisiana and Arkansas. Other countries just reinforced my certainty that wandering is a good thing. Every time I did something slightly strange in a foreign country, I was rewarded with something special. The private tours of the Tratyakovskaya Museum in Moscow, getting exposed to mercury by swimming in the Baltic, wandering Paris at night, walking the Muslim haj in Uzbekistan, kissing an Italian in the middle of Leicester Square in a summer rain.

I’m feeling the wanderlust in the worst way right now, like an itch that I just can’t reach. I’ve been in one place for too long. The only reason Texas held me for so long was my university program and property ownership. The maximum I’ve lived anywhere else was two years. New York has so much to discover, but so do other places. Maybe China. Brazil. South Africa. Egypt. India. Maybe I’ll just finish the remaining four states I haven’t seen. I need change soon.

Posted by G at December 2, 2003 10:42 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.glennalicious.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/94

Comments

Posted by: kayo at December 6, 2003 12:45 AM

Posted by: Out There at December 17, 2003 04:53 PM