A Blast From the Past or How I came to love to travel

     So how did I come by my love of travel? Especially to the crazy exotic places we seem to frequent? I simultaneously blame and am grateful to my parents who were globetrotters before it became fashionable and saw nothing wrong with dragging along their kiddies. They also fully believed in straying off the beaten path even when we took "normal" vacations.  From an early age I was taught that February meant a stay on a Caribbean isle - which in the '60's were not the popular tourist destinations that they are now. And although my parents certainly enjoyed relaxing on the beach, each trip entailed ventures into the local towns to walk in the markets and trips to any and all local attractions that they could find. As we got a bit older our ranges grew wider aided by my father's international lecture circuits.
     My mother believed in 3 guiding principles while traveling. First and foremost, she did not pay "x" amount of money for us to sit around in a hotel room (which is true as she certainly didn't pay for these vacations!).  If you were sick you could just as easily be sick while sight-seeing as you could in bed.  This accounts for one of my favorite childhood memories of at age 10 suffering from food poisoning in Athens and vomiting all over the Acropolis.  This also may have contributed to my choice of medicine as a career as I was often called in to patch someone up so we could go on - I remember distinctly having to use my eyebrow tweezers to remove some glass from the bottom of my brother's foot and use my acne wash (because it container alcohol) to disinfect the wounds while on vacation in a remote outpost of New Guinea. We had a bus to catch to see the Mud men!
     The next principle my mother acted on was her complete belief that NOTHING BAD COULD EVER HAPPEN TO HER OR HER FAMILY.  And therefore there was no reason not to take any risks or do anything absurdly dangerous because, hey, It's an ADVENTURE!!!   This was why at any given time you could find our family driving down cliffside switchbacks on a volcano in Maui in a rented car with no lights and no brakes during a severe thunderstorm in pitch black darkness (we did stop once on the way down so my poor brother could relieve his stomach of it's contents by the side of the road).  Or find our land rover stopped in the middle of lion country in Serengeti National Park and my mother taking my poor brother out of the car so he could pee while our guide screamed and cried. (my brother did have a bladder the size of a watermelon pit - he was a bit of a pain)  And probably why, in Australia, my mother saw nothing wrong with sending me back into the water to pick up and bring back WITH MY BARE HANDS the live poisonous cone shell (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conus if you don't believe me) that I had found which she coveted for her shell collection. To be fair I did survive the encounter, as she so lovingly pointed out, "See you didn't die!" when I deposited the treasure into her bag.

Poisonous Cone Shell

Pirate Skull?

     Finally my mother truly believed that anything she found while on vacation was hers to bring home with her as she wished.  She may have rivaled the Metropolitan and British Museum's archeology teams from the early 1900's in her "finders keepers" mantra.  In this aspect she was actually an impressive international smuggler. Through the years her loot has included live sea creatures (well dead by the time they reached our house - imagine how the stewardesses enjoyed placing her carry on bags in the overhead compartments!), live chameleons (I remember holding a chameleon in 2 plastic cups behind my back as the nice man from US customs smiled at me and asked if I was carrying anything I shouldn't be back across the border...and gravely shaking my head no as my mother pinched my arm), actual pieces of a human skull we found while beach combing in Barbados (she told us they were ex-pirate remains at the time to get us on board with this. Now when I think of it...perhaps not.) She took home all manner of small found artifacts from Egypt and Greece and anywhere else she went. Her piece de resistance though was the time she somehow brought back a cannon ball - that's right, an ACTUAL CANNON BALL - from a fort in Puerto Rico. How you ask? In her purse.
     Africa, Australia, Greece, Paris, Hong Kong, New Guinea, New Zealand, Switzerland, Venezuela...and of course all over the US including Alaska and Hawaii - these were the vacations of my childhood and thus shaped my view of travel as an adult. Which, of course, I have spread to my husband and children resulting in our own set of fun family vacation adventures.  I will be posting about some of our family trips in the next few weeks until I actually have something live to post about.
     One last thing for which you can all blame my mother, an avid and fairly brilliant photographer, is putting a camera in my hands at an early age.  This is why you will soon be suffering through the zillions of pics I will be posting!

     Hi guys! Well as you may have guessed I'm new to this blogging thing but already I can see there being a few issues we are going to have to contend with...mainly 1) I take far too many photos than any one human being should be allowed to (and I am horrendously indecisive about picking out the "best" few to display), and 2) many of the places I travel to are fairly (if not totally) remote and thus internet access is sketchy (if it exists at all).  This means much of my blogging will have to be done through a retrospectascope.  Especially anything I will be posting up until my next vacation (Destination - Morocco!).  But of course the beauty of the blog is that you don't have to read it if you don't like it.  So I guess I'll just give it a whirl and see what tales I can spin. And post as many pics as I can 'cause I like to - HA!