INCEPTION
Besides being a really cool sci-fi movie from about a decade ago, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines inception as “an act, process or instance of beginning.” One thing about having one’s own blog is that we can write about anything. Today I want to start at the beginning of travels with children… before we had children. My wife Rose and I met while working at UCLA Medical Center. We knew early on that we enjoyed travelling together, and we did a lot of it. Our first trip together celebrated my Bachelor’s degree from UCLA. We visited London, Paris, Switzerland and Amsterdam. Our honeymoon included a quick cruise to the Bahamas and an extensive luxury tour of Spanish Colonial haciendas and ancient Mayan architecture in the Yucatan peninsula. There was a time when we used frequent flyer miles to visit Peru. We then met my Father in Atlanta and jumped on a flight to Denmark with him because Dad was dying from lung cancer at a relatively young age and had always wanted to visit that side of our family’s homeland. That trip cost me an ear by the way, literally one ear… my right one. But that’s a different story. And there were many other trips stateside along the way.
After about half a dozen years together we decided to have children. We enjoyed travelling so much that we decided children would not slow us down. Well not for long. There is a saying that on the sea of life the first child drops your sail, the second drops the anchor. While travels with children necessarily involves a higher level of organization, and we spend much more time with the basics of mobility. Rose and I decided that we would not change our travel style. Our travel style is rapid and highly mobile. See what needs to be seen and move on… very little lingering. There aren’t too many pictures of us lounging on a beach or camping in the same place for a week. In fact, there are very few photos of us camping at all. That is simply not our style. If it was, the title of the blog might be “camping with children.” Through this style we move to the point of exhaustion, but we see more. How much time does one really need to imprint the image of the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal, or Mona Lisa on our brain? Some more than others of course, this enjoyment of a non-stop style of vacationing is something Rose and I have in common.
One other factor that greatly contributes to this page is the fact that for Rose, if we didn’t take a photograph, it didn’t happen. While this can be tedious when we repeatedly stop what we are doing and group together for every photograph, I appreciate the beauty of remembering details that comes later, and as I am building this page. Looking both back and ahead I can advise taking more photos than you think you should. Take the extra time to incorporate the process of photographs in to your trip. It is easy to be cynical when taking a bunch of time out of your trip for photos. However, the process itself can be fun when taking care to frame a nice photo, and viewing the world in part as frames for photos. The rewards when looking back will make it worthwhile.