The Earliest Trips

As the subhead of this little travel journal indicates, my wanderlust was inculcated early in my life on this planet. It would be accurate to attribute it exclusively to my father, as, bizarrely, my mother didn't learn to drive until I was at least 5. My father, however, was 11 years her senior and always loved going places and seeing things. He had enlisted in the Army at the outbreak of World War II, and had been shipped off to England. If he didn't already love all things British, he came back a bona fide Anglophile. It would be nearly 20 years before he would return to that "scepter'd isle" - as Shakespeare described it - but he took me and my brother with him in 1966 - when I was 12 - and changed my view of the world.

Our father-daughter adventures in travel began long before that, though. Saturday mornings we would go off to do errands - to the tailor, a lovely Hungarian man, Julius, whom my father had known for decades and who had tailored and dry cleaned my father's suits; or to the meat market - a small neighborhood grocery where the meat was prime and cut by hand. One of the owners, Fred, stood behind the meat counter and always greeted me as "the Duchess." I never really understood that, but I always liked it. Later, as I got older (13 maybe), he would call me "Veronica Lake" because my then-long hair usually covered one eye. I was too young to understand that reference, too, but I liked it.

And I remember Sunday mornings accompanying my father to his office, high up in a historic, 15-story building in the downtown area of the city. (He was a lawyer and liked to spend a few hours there in the quiet of the weekend.) After an hour or two, we would descend, stop across the street at Walgreen's where I'd order my requisite chocolate milk shake and a French cruller. It's a miracle I didn't balloon to 200lbs! After being fortified with as much sugar as my system could handle, we'd head off to visit one of dad's several aunts who lived in town, or we'd go off to visit old friends in "the country."

It's those car rides in the country I remember most fondly. We would travel back roads and as he drove, I would just look at the lush scenery or the brilliant autumn leaves that were so spectacular in October. (I also was always on the look-out for horses in the fields, of course.) I didn't realize it then, but those were our special times together. I always went along eagerly. One never knew where he would go. They were our adventures, but I'm sure it served to get me (and sometimes my older brother, too) out of the house so my mother could have a little peace. It didn't matter, though. I liked it.

Those traveling seeds were planted early in me by my father...and it's one of his most wonderful legacies to me.