Wanderlust

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote: To travel is to live.”
—Hans Christian Andersen

It was a pleasant summer day, and we were jouncing along in our Model A Ford over a rutted section of a dirt highway on our way to the Lake of the Ozarks, 150 miles from our Kansas City home. I could see that we were about to hit a stretch of pavement and I leaned forward in anticipation.

As soon as we were on the paved road Dad sped up and exclaimed, “We're going a mile a minute!”

I remember many such road trips with my parents and Dad always being excited when we hit paved sections of the road. Dad, an expert driver, had built two racing cars from scratch before he was 21.

I must have been born with a passion for travel. My memory bank is full of pictures of traveling with my parents by automobile.

The Model A was replaced by a conventional sedan long before air-conditioning and every one of our cars carried a plastic bag of water tied above the front bumper to refill the radiator, which sometimes overheated and boiled over. No air-conditioning meant driving with the windows open so, by the end of the day, we were so grimy that the first order of business after stopping was a hot shower.

One of the longest of our many trips was from Kansas City to Maine. For several days I was dreaming of swimming in the ocean. When we saw the first Maine beach, I raced to the water and dove in. What a shock when I hit that ice-cold water!

The summer I was fifteen, I went on a trip that, in retrospect, changed my life. That summer I traveled with a sailing group from Lake Lotawana, outside Kansas City, to Lake Okoboji, in northern Iowa. We were a pretty ragtag group since this was the first time, we Lotawana sailors had ever traveled with our boats. We were using a crude collection of farm trailers instead of specially designed boat trailers. While we were unloading, a beautiful Chrysler convertible with wood paneled sides, pulled up to watch the unloading. Two of the most beautiful women I've ever seen stepped out of that convertible. One was Robbie Gibbon who, after a lot of ups and downs over the years, became my wife.

The following fall when I was sixteen, I crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary to begin my year as an English-speaking Union exchange student at Haileybury College in Hertfordshire England. There were 22 of us exchange students on board. In those days, the Queen Mary was a three-class ship, and we were, of course, assigned to the cheapest, Tourist Class. Our berths were in the bowels of the ship with cabin class level above and the very ritzy first class on the top deck. The stairways had barricades to prevent any upward movement, but they were easily bypassed, and we could pretty much roam the ship at our leisure. I found first class a little stuffy, but the people in Cabin Class seemed to tolerate us when we passed the barricade to visit. We did not take our meals there, but we thoroughly enjoyed their comfortable movie theater and the snacks they served.

My trip back to the USA on the Queen Elizabeth was more of the same except that my confidence had grown, and I spent more time in Cabin Class, where I especially enjoyed the snacks that were served every afternoon.

The British have a more enlightened school vacation policy than we do in the U.S. Our short Christmas and spring breaks allow for a long summer vacation originally intended for the students to have time to help with farm work. For some crazy reason we continue to stick with this silly policy although, I understand, there is some change finally taking place. In England you have almost a month’s vacation at Christmas, a month in the spring and about six weeks in the summer. This gives students time to explore the continent during their breaks and their summer holiday is not so long that they have forgotten what school is all about. I am hopeful that American educators are beginning to see the picture.

I wanted to learn to ski so the first place I went on my Christmas holiday was Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. The leader of our group of ESU exchange students had chosen it because it was reasonable (cheap) however we found that it was not really a ski resort at all but a summer resort with snow. Having been on basically wartime diets in England, we reveled at the food and the goodwill of our hosts though our ski training consisted of doing the herringbone while walking uphill for 30 minutes to snowplow back down to the bottom in three minutes, then to repeat the process. One of our group was hurt one day, wandered down to the railway station and found large groups of skiers heading to higher altitudes and the ski resort of Wengen. The next day we said farewell to our gracious hosts and boarded the train for Wengen. What a different world: charming village with active shops, ski lifts, instructors and, most important of all, GIRLS. It was a delightful place to learn to ski.

Later that same trip I met my father at St. Moritz. He was a good sport and skied with me until, skiing fast and showing off, I accidentally skied into deep snow and broke my wooden skis. I was lucky not to break my stupid legs. Dad and I decided to hit the beach and headed for Nice, France. What a disappointment. The weather was so cold we had to wear our overcoats. And the beaches were all rocks, not sand. This trip was when my father discovered the French motorized bicycles called VéloSoleX that we rented. Dad was so entranced with them that he secured the exclusive rights to sell them in the USA. Unfortunately, that was one of his unsuccessful ventures as the bikes were a big success with the younger crowd, but the police insisted you had to be sixteen and have a driver's license to ride one even though they were no faster than a regular bike with an enthusiastic rider.

My college travel was pretty routine—spring break visiting Robbie's parents’ condominium in Florida and trips to Sioux City to visit her in the summer. I also had the opportunity to travel with my father to his plants in Leicester, England, Paris and Milan and then later to Luxembourg for the opening of the factory he built there to serve the European Union.

Robbie and I went to Europe twice. Betty and George Byers traveled with us on part of both of these trips. On the first one we picked up a Volkswagen van in Rome and drove it north to Paris. I enjoyed the sightseeing but got terribly irritated with Betty because she wanted to explore every cathedral we passed.

Many years later, after my divorce and George's death, Betty and I were married and began a life of traveling in earnest spending 8 to 9 months each year cruising the world on our sailboat and later exploring almost full-time in our RVs.