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Recently in Salon Travel

Out of the Blue
Welcome to the Mile-High Club
Our flying correspondent relates some true tales of sex in the skies.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[09/21/99]

The tearful secret of Themar
A grandmother's tale, untold until now, opens a path of understanding and forgiveness.
By Robert L. Strauss
[09/20/99]

My Jewish roots in Germany
Reluctantly and without a plan, an American uncovers his family's poignant past.
By Robert L. Strauss
[09/18/99]

Travel Advisor
Lost and found and sold
Our travel expert directs readers to unclaimed baggage treasures, high-elevation photography tips and that romantic, albeit cozy, freighter vacation.
By Donald D. Groff
[09/16/99]

Book Bag
Writers We Love: Pico Iyer
This world-wanderer masterfully tracks the intricacies of the dance of East and West.
By Don George
[09/15/99]

Complete archives for Travel

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When you travel alone, you're free to wander at whim, to spend hours in front of that one Monet painting if you want to, to read, sip and scribble an afternoon away in a sidewalk cafe, to spontaneously hop on the slow boat to Lindos or the horse cart to Bukittinggi. And as a solo traveler you're befriended by English-practicers at every turn; opportunities for serendipitous encounters and detours abound.

When you travel with your family, on the other hand, you're about as approachable and flexible as an expeditionary force. It takes hours just to get from your hotel room to the beach outside your window. When your children are young, you need Sherpas to carry all the accouterments you require; when they're older, you need security guards. Spontaneity doesn't often happen -- and when it does, it necessitates profuse apologies and large sums of cash.

"Family vacation" is an oxymoron. And yet, somehow, more and more families are traveling more and more places than ever before.

Actually, my family is a happy example: Our first child was born 13 Augusts ago, and a couple of months later, I was named travel editor of a major metropolitan newspaper. At that time I decided the universe was issuing me a challenge: Here are your wings, and here are your roots. Marry them.

And we did. Before my daughter had started preschool, we had visited Japan, Australia, Mexico and Hawaii. When our son was born four years after her, we kept going: Hong Kong, Greece, France, Fiji, plus more Japan, Mexico and Hawaii. We'd adapted our traveling ways, but we hadn't curtailed them.

And everywhere we went, we met other families who were similarly staking their claim in this brave new world. People who had explored Asia and Europe in the 1960s and '70s weren't going to let a child or two get in the way of their global explorations; travel was stitched into the very fabric of their lives.

This phenomenon is the unspoken raison d'être of a new anthology in the Travelers' Tales series, "Family Travel: The Farther You Go, the Closer You Get."

Much as I admire the Travelers' Tales books, I must admit that I approached this one with trepidation. In my experience as a writer and editor, compelling articles about family travels are as rare as Buddha-babies on transatlantic flights. At times -- usually when I am on deadline, contemplating a blank screen with increasing desperation -- it has seemed to me that family travel and good travel writing are simply incompatible. And yet, as many of the offerings in this surprisingly enjoyable anthology show, children can be extraordinary travel companions, who deepen and enrich our understanding of the world. You just have to learn to read a different map.

This theme runs throughout the volume, beginning with the introduction by editor Laura Manske, who writes: "My eleven-year-old son, Max, and my seven-year-old daughter, Natasha, ask 'Why?' when I otherwise would have moved on. I would have missed so much if I hadn't had these little magnifying-glass people with me. They give me balance. They give me roots. They give me stronger wings. They encourage me to look under the leaves in the proverbial forest. So I explain and explain again, and consider my children's innocent and often insightful queries as precious gifts that open doors."

Or as Mary Morris writes in the anthology's first piece, "Blessed": "What you get is this: You get to see a child's eyes the first time she sees an ocean or an elephant, smells a pine forest or gazes at the ongoing narrative told from the window of a train. You experience the world as the child experiences it, for the first time, all over again."

Of course, family travel encompasses generations preceding as well as succeeding, and some of these stories deal with adult children traveling with elderly parents. Others expand the concept of family even further: An exchange student finds a second family in Italy, an American visits the family of his foster child in the Philippines, a miscarriage on the road forges a culture-bridging bond, travelers look for ancestral roots or for vestiges of their own childhoods.

Next page | The boundaries that constrain and the bonds that transcend them