World Traverlers or Couch Potatos?

 

 

 

 

I often wonder if our girls will grow up loving to travel or just being homebodies, content to putter around their houses and spend their time in their own backyards.
Both Ben and I did not have many travel adventures growing up. We had one big family trip to Disney when I was young, and many trips up to the cabin (can you call that a vacation when you don't have plumbing?) other than that it was an overnight trip to Cedar Point. I loved to read and made a list inside my head of places I wanted to visit and things I wanted to see. Ben and I love exploring new places, we don't need big fancy houses with tons of upkeep, we don't want the hassle, we don't need expensive furniture or knick knacks or jewelry. The only expensive thing I want is my camera, and we would rather spend our money on travel.
When my sister graduated she went to school to be a travel agent, that is when I first really got to travel, we went to California when I was 16 and Tennessee a year later. After graduation I went to Paris and Madrid, then a few trips to the Caribbean. And as much as I love the Caribbean and tropical locations, both Ben and I are quite content to limit our travels to the United States...there is so much we haven't explored. And we are fortunate enough for Ben to have a job that relocates us and we can get a taste of different regions.
We did not feel that we had enough time in the West, so hopefully we can get back there at some point, but we have been in the east for a year now, we have visited the Smokey's again, and Baltimore, we are heading down to the Outer Banks in a week! Yahoo...and let's see...Ben wants to hit Maine, I want to do Boston, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, hear there are beautiful places in Delaware, Vermont in the fall...I could go on..
However this is supposed to be my thoughts on the girls. We took their first road trip when they were 3, my cousin and I took all 5 kids (2 sets of 3 yr old twins and a 5 yr old) down to Ky, just on the other side of Cincinnati to an aquarium and the zoo. The later that year we met Ben in the Smokey's to celebrate father's day...that was also their first hike..if you can call it that, Ben pushed their stroller for the whole 4 mile round trip.
The girls are great car travelers, never antsy, they occupy themselves, could not ask for better riders. Then after we moved to Utah, we started flying, first to California for a vacation with their Grammy, then back and forth to MI. The girls are now seasoned travelers. They know exactly how to get through security, they know how to look for their seats on the plane (this last trip they even got to sit in the cockpit) when exiting the plane and needing a connecting flight, Justine will even march up to the airline staff, dragging her carry-on behind her, and ask what gate she needs, then she will look both ways to see which direction she needs to go and off to the next gate she sails.
But I wonder...do they like traveling or is it just something they endure? When the choice becomes theirs, will they choose to see more of the world or be content to remain at home? The girls will be 7 in a week and will be celebrating in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, then we have a Disney trip planned for October, that will be states 25 and 26 that they have been in! Even with just a quick trip to the amusement park that was 4 hrs away and a hotel stay, I remember going to bed so excited for the next day that I could not sleep, bugging my mom about when we were leaving, "how many days now?" My kids don't have that. With as many adventures they have went on, I guess they are a little jaded.
Anyways I love going on hikes...I guess more than the girls do. It was overheard on our trip to Arches National Park, my nephew David asked Caroline why we have to walk so much, Caroline responded with, "Don't you get it? We walk all this way, take a picture by a rock then we walk all the way back and do it again." The above pics were taken at our hike in Jones Hole outside of Vernal Utah this summer. They were excited at the beginning of our hike, and it was a relatively short hike, but we did not make it to the waterfall, the weather and the complaining turned us back. Now my friend Deb and her brother, grew up traveling and hiking, and they both still does it as an adult, even spend a year or so backpacking in different countries, and she says the complaining is normal, both her and her brother complained when they were younger and grew up loving it not hating it. So maybe there is hope...
Who knows...will the girls memories be, Oh, the time we got to go here or will it be...oh yeah, my mom and dad dragged us there...