Somewhere along life’s path, I was bitten by the travel bug.  Actually, if you ask my husband, GR, it was more like I was attacked by a swarm of the little buggers.  And they have infected me with an incorrigible and costly disease of which I’m not sure that I want to be cured.  I love to travel.  I crave it from deep within my soul.  And even though the craving goes mostly unrequitted, travel is one of my great passions in life. 

In fact, the occasional trip to the Atlanta airport to pick up my mother makes me dizzy with excitement.  When she flies into town, I’ll sometimes arrive at the airport a bit early just so that I can watch the hustle and bustle of travelers arriving and departing on flights to and from foreign lands.  Actually, they’re probably just traveling to and from other states, but nonetheless it’s exciting for me to think that they’re off to somewhere exotic or foreign.

And it’s not as if I’ve traveled to many places in my life.  I am not a world traveler by ANY stretch of the means.  Mostly I just dream about and research places that I would like to visit.  And then I talk about it for a while, look at my non-existent bank account, and decide that I better get back to work.  But a girl can dream, right?

Anyhow, as I was growing up, my parents made it a point to take my sister and me on a couple of family vacations each year.  Usually we visited the beach in the summer and the Smoky Mountains in the fall, but they were vacations that we looked forward to with great anticipation.  And when I was 9 years old, my dad bought a conversion van—mainly for the purposes of our trips.  I called it The Big Yellow Twinkie…

We traveled to many places in that van—Memphis, TN to see Graceland; Washington D.C. to tour the capitol; Pennsylvania to visit family and the Amish countryside; Atlantic City, NJ to walk on the boardwalk; and to many places along the Blue Ridge Parkway and up and down the Florida coasts.

When I was 11 years old, we loaded up that big hunk of a Twinkie and began a 2-week journey across the Western U. S.  We started in Georgia, of course, and drove as far as Las Vegas—visiting as many kitschy places along the way that we could find.  Cadillac Ranch?  We saw it.  JR’s Southfork Ranch?  We were visitors.  Bedrock City—home of the Flintstones?  We were there, y’all!  And all the while singing the tunes of my dad’s favorite country singers, Waylon and Willie.  It was such a fun trip and one that I will never forget.  Well, I would remember a lot more of it had the journal that I kept during the trip not mysteriously disappeared when we were almost back in Georgia (cough-sister kicked it out the door at a gas station-cough, cough).

Here we are at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona:

And when I was 15, I took my first journey on an airplane to the Bahamas.  That’s where I also got my first taste of room service…which will come back to haunt me later at the Opryland Hotel (am I right, Aunt Patty Cake?).  Here I am (in my 4XL shirt trying to hide my embarrassing skinniness—WTF?) standing with my sister who’s wearing what looks to be an outfit that she borrowed from my grandmother (just kidding, sister-who-reads-my-blog)…

And besides more trips to Florida and to the Tennessee mountains, that pretty much sums up my vacation adventures until I turned 19.  And that’s when I got a job in the travel industry and my real wanderlust began.  “Real” meaning the kind of wanderlust that I could plan on my own and sadly enough—personally finance.  Lucky for me I worked in the travel industry.  Not so lucky for GR.

To be continued next Friday…
(Settle down my two dear readers, I know that this is tantalizing, juicy stuff…)