After a long weekend in London, mingling with the camels on the beaches of Tunisia, then spending another two weeks driving around Slovenia and its surroundings, catching up with family and friends, I’m ready for a vacation now! Preferably alone but a husband as a companion will do as well.
Mia took her first flight, alone with me, a few weeks shy of six months, while Jakob was barely two months old when his time came to start moving around Europe. Since then, they’ve visited over ten countries on three different continents. Is it fun? Enormously! Is it relaxing? Not usually. So why do we always get excited when planning our next break, if you can call it so, even with the memory of utter exhaustion still fully impressed into my memory? Because we’re crazy, basically! In all honesty, it’s a hard question to answer but here are three main reasons.
ONE I truly believe travelling is as much a mental exercise as it is a physical one. It broadens your horizons, opens up your mind by exposing you to other customs, it makes my children see all the possibilities the world has to offer them, promotes acceptance of cultures, customs and people different from them.
The sole fact of moving from one place to another is always a learning experience for us all; through the years, it taught us patience and ingenuity, it improved our communication skills and enlightened us on travelling light, which in turn helped with the decluttering of our living space.
Then, there are the places we’ve visited, which always sparked the most diverse of discussions. Mia came to me, uncertain as to why everybody, perfect strangers included, kept touching her, stroking her hair and patting her head in Tunisia, which led to a conversation about the understanding of personal space in different cultures. A visit to Sicily triggered an interest in vulcanos in Jakob (and a fear of vulcano eruptions in Mia), while last summer in Bosnia, sown with monuments to its fallen, I had to explain the nonsense of war. A close encounter with a violent tropical storm while driving through the Carrabians lead to a lesson on different climates around the globe and a visit to Joséphine’s birth house made us realize just how small the world was even back in the 18th century. After posing in front of Columbus’s tomb we spoke about the era of great discoveries and the absolutely magnificent audio-visual show at Carriére de Lumiére made my cubs want to know more about art. I am immensely proud that at such a young age, my children are knowledgeable about such a variety of topics.
TWO Fun has a different meaning for different people, surely, but for us, it means discovering new places and experiencing them as a family. Making memories is fun for the children and touching looking back at them for us; it makes for a common history, it bonds and amalgamates us into a unit. The memory of a two-year-old Jakob tasting rambutan for the first time on the island of Martinique and calling it ramtamtam for the rest of our stay there, always makes me smile, while Jakob himself loves hearing the anecdote over and over again. Hearing them reminiscing about the summer at the Cote d’Azur, the friends they made on Ibiza or the camels they rode on the Canary Islands, the toy they got at Rijksmuseum and the time Mia vomited all over Marko on a bus in Malta, the flamenco dancers on the streets of Sevilla lined with orange trees, the pirate dinner in Omiš where Jakob feasted on frog’s legs or the time they tested their medieval-archery skills in Provençe – it’s heart-warming and makes for wonderful memories they like to talk about and being told about (for the umpteenth time).
THREE In the end, the two of us, Marko and me, crave travelling. Although I cannot put my finger on what exactly propels us to pack our necessities and put ourselves through a grueling few hours, there is undeniably a certain je ne sais quoi that makes us undertake this endeavour time after time. The only way we can do it, is by dragging our offsprings along. And hopefully passing this same love on to them as well by presenting the pleasures and the thrills of taking a plane and whizzing away somewhere new, somewhere far, somewhere exciting!
