Travelday

When I was ten years old, my father brought me to Paris for the first time. We flew into London Heathrow and spent a day in the city. I fell asleep on the double-decker bus: my first and only brush with jet lag. The next evening, we had first-class tickets on the brand-new Eurostar train. We had dinner under the English Channel.

Ever since then, I have been blessed (or cursed) with wanderlust. I couldn’t get enough. It started small enough, with weekends spent at my best friend’s house. It always started as one night, but invariably I would make the telephone call, begging “please, please, please” to let me stay just one more night. None of my other siblings were like this. I know now, after years of experience, that even just these nights spent a mere thirty minutes from home were about the brush with the unknown, the unfamiliar. Transporting myself from my house, where I was the oldest of four children and my parents were 70s and early 80s kids to my best friend’s life, only child of hippie parents, was an incredible sensation. We blasted Beatles music and fell in love with John Lennon all over again, and returning home felt miles away.

It started with Bridgehampton, New York. But it didn’t stop there.

The next step was the begging, pleading for summer camp. First Colorado, the the Berkshires, then Maine. I would have kept going, except by then I had moved on: my new love was Europe.

The summer of 2001, when I had just turned fourteen years old, I went to Cambridge University for a three-week study trip, and I loved every moment of it. I signed myself up for nearly every extracurricular play, walking tour and workshop. I soaked in the culture, my surroundings, the people. I don’t know that I’ve ever embraced one city so wholeheartedly and head first as I did that time.

After Cambridge, I had plans to go to Bondues, France for three months. Bondues was yet another key to my wanderlust, and the one that is most actively discussed in my daily life. There’s that constant question as soon as people learn that I’m bilingual: “Are your parents French?” No… they’re not. I have no French lineage whatsoever. I’m bilingual because of that trip to France, living with a French family in the north and going to school entirely in French. It was one of the most difficult and the most rewarding experience of my life.

I fell in love with France, as so many of us do, and my high school years, which I spent at a boarding school in Massachusetts (unheard of in my family) were tinged with trips back: a visit at New Years, a summer spent on the west coast of France studying the language, and, finally, when I graduated, my first backpacking trips. Five weeks with my two best friends from high school before college started.

College was in Canada. Another oddball move, I know. I’m not unaware of the strangeness of my story, just unfazed. I lived in Toronto for two years before making a bold and random move to Cannes, in the south of France, for the last four months of my sophomore year. After three weeks, I knew that the change would be permanent.

After yet another backpacking trip, a job teaching English to French kids and French to Americans, and a very brief trip back to the States for my new passport and visa, I was back in Europe, this time in Paris, to finish my undergraduate degree in the first country I fell in love with.

This is a very wordy way to start a new blog, I’m aware. If you’ve made it this far, I congratulate you. I had considered a smaller post to start, a mini-introduction, but then I realized that this is as mini as my relationship with travel can become. There are already a lot of holes: my love affair with Italy, my time spent in Spain, and the anecdotes that come with all of the places I’ve mentioned so briefly and without the fanfare they deserve.

Starting with that trip to Cambridge, I embrace everywhere I go, fully, falling headfirst into the places I live. I’m a nomad, but unlike so many nomads I know who just “stay” places for a little while, I move in everywhere. I unpack all my stuff, I put my name on the buzzer, I get the paper delivered. This is a travel blog, for want of a better word, but it’s also my story. I hope that in reading this, you come to love the places I’ve loved as much as I have. Take my tips, my photos, my stories of the best places to go in this or that city, and make them your own. Embrace them. Fall in love with travel. For me, there is no other way to live.