“What is your favourite part of travel?” asked my eight-years-old daughter, who was eager to start packing for our skiing trip over the Christmas holiday.
I wasn’t sure I understood what she meant. Obviously, I like the skiing part, but I had a sense that it wasn’t what she was aiming at.
“My number-one favourite thing is packing,” she explained. “Second is arriving to the hotel room, and driving there is the third-favourite part
I am pretty sure “third-favourite” really meant “the part that could be skipped without missing much”.
I thought about my own order of preferences. I agree with her that anticipation is a large part of the overall experience. Planning of a trip is at least half of the fun, or at least it could be so. Unfortunately, for me there is often not enough time to enjoy the planning phase, to slow down and do it methodically. Packing is a perfect example. More often than not I scramble to do it at the last moment, and so it becomes a chore. Indeed, whatever is worth doing is worth doing slowly.
I find it amusing how much my daughter enjoys the novelty of the new environment. That’s her number two on the list of favourite aspects of travel. Playing in the hotel’s pool and being able to build a “royal bed” by collecting all the pillows she could find erased even the momentary sadness of saying goodbye to Bruno, our puppy, who is staying with his breeder during our trip.
For me, it’s the people we come across one way or another during the travel that ultimately make the experience what it is. Debbie, Bruno’s breeder, for example, had her hands full with a litter of puppies, yet she accepted him without hesitation at our first request. I really hope that Bruno’s first Christmas will be more enjoyable in the company of his original family than sitting in a crate while we go skiing. I somehow suspect he would not have shared my daughter’s enthusiasm about our hotel room.
On the way to skiing, I ran into my kendo sensei in a cafeteria. Two minutes of face-to-face chat to catch up about the kids and the parents, sharing our pride in their achievements and concerns about their health felt like being reassured that someone still shares your values and cares about your going-ons beyond a Facebook “like”. Watching us talk, my daughter suddenly became sad that I put kendo on hold in the past year in order to pursue other things together with her. And I became a bit sad that she is becoming a bit more grown-up every day, right before my eyes.
Then, there was a family from Brazil, whom we met at the pool. They live in Victoria as part of their sabbatical. Their experience of this part of the world was so positive that it reminded me how much of it I’ve come to take for granted. The hedonic treadmill is a tough thing indeed.
And the family time in the company of my daughter, wife and parents – being able to experience it in the context of travel, even if it’s short three hours away from home, is definitely a treat.
