Growing up a proud Michigander, I was under the impression that all the lakes worth visiting were in my home state. If not only for the beauty, majesty and bragging rights that come with being the “Great Lakes State” but for the sheer number of bodies of water found here. Minnesota, “land of a thousand lakes”? We scoff at you. Michigan is home to over 11,000! No matter where in the state you are standing, you are never more than six miles from one of these refreshing beauties. Can that be topped? Michigan is surely the epicenter of all things freshwater and deserves every lake-related accolade.
Have you ever had the experience of returning to a place you had been before, to find it utterly different than you remembered?
On a recent trip to Northern Italy, we planned a stay in the ancient city of Bergamo. It is everything a northern medieval city should be: walled, with twisting, turning, nonsensical streets that are too narrow for a car (even the tiny, European variety) to navigate. In a city like this one, we were determined to enjoy every charm available. We booked a room in a renovated hotel that was originally built in the 1500s, overlooking the main piazza and famous bell tower of the city. A fairytale kind of place.
Our first day in Hawaii was, admittedly, a bust. A total and complete, embarrassing, hide-your-face-in-shame bust. It was supposed to rain, you see – not just on that first day, but the entire time we were on Maui. The forecast was bleak, filled with rain clouds and 80-100 percent chance of precipitation on day after day of our very expensive, much-anticipated vacation.
Being a Michigander, snow is nothing new to me. It holds no real fascination or wonder. It simply … is. For almost nine long years, I lived without it (excepting jaunts back home to visit family or holiday trips to Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.). But still, moving to a place that has snow and cold holds no real special meaning for me, and I didn’t consider cold weather to be a negative, or an obstacle, nor something to celebrate. Snow and cold weather are simply a fact of life to me, no matter how ethereal and beautiful snowflakes appear to my Texan husband.
I have never lived in a place that had mountains. Heck, where I’m from, in Michigan, we barely have big hills. But here in Alberta, we have the grandeur of the Canadian Rockies – and my goodness, they are gorgeous.
In my mind, a cross-country road trip always sounded glamorous and exciting. Sites to visit, canyons to peer across, large bodies of sparkling water to ponder. Deserts, roadside diners, singing at the top of your lungs to a road trip playlist. This is the way road trips are portrayed not only in movies, but also in many travel blogs and travel magazines. Memories made, new perspectives discovered, glimpses into the interior of the great United States.
It seems to me that Paris is a kind of reminder; a place that always brings memories to the surface, even if it is your first visit. Memories of movies set in Paris, or long-lost quotes about the city that you’ve heard, somewhere, sometime.
One of our very favorite things to do is spend the holidays in a foreign place. I think it’s because we live in Texas, and so does my husband’s family; but my family is so far away, up in Michigan. Prices to travel up north during the holidays are always crazy – and so, in an effort to make neither set of parents jealous and somehow make both sets dissatisfied, we decided at some point to start holidaying abroad. This way, neither parent could accuse us of spending more time with one side of the family, and all parents would feel as though they’d been slighted somehow at Christmastime. A lose-lose, all around.
When I was in college, my mother took me on a trip from Flint to Chicago on the Amtrak train. I remember little to nothing about it, except the fact that we took the train instead of driving, and it stays in my memory as unremarkable, if nothing else.
