The Untold Stories of a Life of Traveling

 As I write this, I am no longer on the windswept barren landscape of central Nevada, but far away, thousands of miles in fact, listening as the surf pounds the base of the cliff below below the condo we have rented for a couple nights from AirBnB. Nearby the palm trees are clacking in the stiff, warm breeze. It is sunny and lush.

Yesterday afternoon, after a six hour non-stop flight from Phoenix, we landed at Lihue airport here on the island of Kauai. Ginger had wanted to make a trip to Hawaii. We hadn't taken this kind of luxury just-for-the-heck-of-it vacation in years. Of the four main islands in Hawaii, this is the one that neither of us had visited before, so it was a natural choice. I probably would not have come here unless Ginger had pushed for it, but now that I am here, I am very glad of it.

Funny how memory works. As we left the airport yesterday, my mind was carried back to many years ago,  to a recollection that was jarred loose in my mind. In college in the 1980s I knew a girl who went to Kauai, on a trip that was paid by her grandparents as a gift. What I remembered was how she said she had wound up making the trip all by herself. Her boyfriend at the time went off on some other adventure and abandoned her. Other than thinking her boyfriend was clueless, what struck me was her sadness in recollecting the trip because she had been by herself in such a beautiful place. 

At the time, I thought it odd, because when I was younger, and even up until perhaps a decade ago, traveling by myself seemed natural. When I was very young, back in the 1980s I preferred it partly because I met so many people that way. I was open to the world.

But in my old age, the idea of traveling by myself seems very sad. What is the point of going places by oneself? I realized several years ago that a great deal of my enjoyment in traveling alone had been that I got to return home and tell people about my travels--especially my late grandmother (who delighted in hearing my adventures), and my late mother and father, who would sit for hours on end as I narrated what I had seen. I never knew how much that mattered, to do that, until they were all gone and there was no one to tell what I had seen. At that point, the world became a lonely place to me, and every spot on the world, no matter how beautiful, seemed like every other spot. 

To be here by myself, as that girl I once knew had been, would seem like an island prison. But I am not alone, and that makes all the difference.