THE REAL RELUCTANT TRAVELER

I now live in a place I’ve never lived, and we’re also going to go to places we’ve never gone. That’s two big changes right there. I’ve relocated, plus we’re planning to travel. 

I’ve never traveled all that much, least of all outside the United States. I may well be among the least traveled people of my professional status. It probably has a lot to do with my long standing lack of interest in travel. I am, in fact, a homebody. 

Going from one place to another, particularly far away, always seemed such a bother. You had to prepare, you had to pack, you had to get there, and then you had to come back — just so you could be someplace else for a while. To what end? So you could sit on a beach? See a few churches? Eat at a different restaurant? Travel costs money, too, money you could put toward staying put, money you could spend on truly important stuff such as rent, food and children. 

So no, I never understood the appeal of travel. The cons outweighed the pros by about a ton and a half. To me it was generally exciting enough just to visit our kitchen. More ambitiously, I might trek around the corner to the local basketball court. 

Oh, I’ve done some traveling, but mainly when I had to. I’ve traveled on business to Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, D.C., Boston, and other US cities and even once, for about three days, Barcelona. These trips were obligatory and, in some instances, you might say, involuntary. Hey, we do what we have to do to earn a living. And in all too many cases, my time was spent in conference rooms in hotels and corporate offices. 

I traveled for leisure and recreation, too. My parents took us around a little: Niagara Falls, Atlantic City, Miami. Later, in adulthood, with my wife Elvira, we visited the Catskills, the Poconos, some city in Rhode Island. For almost 20 years, our family of four vacationed every summer, happily so, in Mystic, Connecticut. 

We generally stayed close to home. After all, we lived in New York City. All too often l was hard-pressed to find a rationale for going anywhere else. We had everything anyone could ever possibly want at our doorstep: Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, Broadway, Lincoln Center, The Frick Museum, the Brooklyn Heights promenade, Yankee Stadium, Wall Street, subways, crime, every imaginable cuisine, every culture ever invented, and so on, ad infinitum. It was all there, in the city that slept only if no one was looking. 

But almost four years ago my life changed dramatically. I moved to Southern Italy, where I now live. And suddenly Europe, the whole of it, is right in my backyard. Suddenly, too, living my life in a more leisurely style is an option. Suddenly, as well, I have finally arrived at an inkling of why travel can be wonderful. 

Elvira is keen to travel, too, and already we’re plotting our excursions. We’ll start in Italy. Our itinerary would include places we’ve already seen, Rome and Florence, but I’ve never seen Naples or Milan or Sicily or Salerno or Pisa or the Amalfi Coast, or any number of other places that I should definitely see. 

We’ll keep it domestic for a while, maybe for a year or so, just as we kept our travel domestic stateside. 

But eventually we’ll venture out hither and yon. Our top target outside Italy is London in particular and England in general, probably in that order. We’ve long since declared our independence from King George, but our sense of kinship and affiliation remains robustly intact. Next is likely Ireland, a land of umpteen literary heroes and all the beer and whisky you can drink. After England and Ireland it’s a toss-up as to where else we might drop in – maybe Greece or Spain or Portugal. 

Our wish list is pretty short. We’d rather go deep in a few places than stay shallow in many. And we’ll do in our travels what people tend to do. We’ll see sights we’ve never seen before: museums, monuments, rivers, landmarks. We’ll sample foods and beverages we’ve never tried, hear all around us languages we’ve rarely overheard. 

But we’ll also discover something that I’ve always believed is the central advantage of travel. Who we are. In my experience, nothing quite defines us as sharply as simply going someplace else. Going out of my element has crystallized my identity. Now that I live in Italy, I’ve never felt more American, more of a New Yorker. 

But this attitude is not mere chest-beating chauvinism. The better we understand ourselves, the better we can understand others. And the more we recognize our differences with others, the sooner we’ll also realize we’re really all the same.