(The substance of this post was written several days ago, but due to my traveling, I was only able to post it today.)

In my youth and young adulthood, I was incredibly fortunate to travel more than most. In high school I won a full scholarship to live in West Germany for a year. My host family, by no means rich, but middle class, arranged for us to take a four-day bus trip to Paris together, as well as to see other parts of their country, not to mention a sweet weekend trip to their favorite town in Belgium (Brugge). The exchange rate was astoundingly good in those days and I was able to put together enough money to travel with a Eurorail pass through Northern Europe, sometimes sleeping outside and hitch-hiking, a few days in England, then to a small coastal town in France that I could probably not identify at this point.

A few years later, I spent my junior year abroad. This sounds luxurious and it was, but it also costed less than a year of regular study at the small, elite college in Upstate New York. That summer, I was accepted into another scholastic program that allowed me to work in West Berlin, then I studied at the Universitetet Stockholm in the fall, and the spring semester, I studied in East Africa. My summer job in Berlin, for a pharmacuetical factory, afforded me enough savings that inbetween Sweden and Kenya, I traveled with a good friend throughout Italy for about three weeks.

Did I say how fortunate I was? It amazes me still. There was so much momentum and interest in those few years of travel, I was pretty sure I would lead an international life, living and working abroad.

Not so much. At least at this point, a quarter century later, not so far.

A few weeks before this current trip to Europe, I spoke with a friend about our various travel abroad experiences; I think of her as a traveler. When I mentioned I spent three weeks traveling in Italy, she was interested to know more details. I rattled off a few places, feeling pretty vague about it; she found my storytelling lacking and surprising.

So did I. Really?  I can’t say with certainty whether I made it to Rome or not?  That’s weird.  Most people remember it if they have been to Rome.  It’s not many people who have had the privilege to travel like I have had. And though it was twenty-five years ago, I don’t think I get to blame age or even peri-menopausal brain blips.

My mind remembers things. Sometimes well and other times, not so much. Yet never has my mind remembered like a travelogue. I don’t tell travel stories that intrigue people about sites I have visited. I like to think that the things I do remember are more human, less magnificent; more contextual, less geographical; more relational, less locational. To be honest, I am not really sure. There are lots of gaps in my memory, and I am coming to find it’s not just my ability to name the towns in Italy that I visited – much less world-famous destinations within them – that is lacking.

All this has made me wonder about this latest privilege of a three week trip to Europe. It is the first time I have been back in fifteen years. I am visiting my teenaged daughter who has been an exchange student in Germany for the past ten months and comes home next month. I am visiting dear friends from my own time as an exchange student 28 years ago. I am meeting for the first time my husband’s family of origin, only two of whom attended our wedding two years ago.

One could say this is a family trip, and it is; but it also has luxurious vacation written all over it. I’m still not quite sure how it worked out that we could do this, much less now. I have been working through my own class feelings around this, around being someone who not only can afford to take a European vacation but is doing so (it’s kind of weird). Whatever I end up doing with these feelings, I am not going to let them sour the joy, for what that’s worth.

That aside, given my rather shoddy memory for travel details, I wonder, too, if it’s kind of wasted on me, since it’s likely that I won’t remember details for very long (if at all).  It’s equally unlikely that I will be able to regale anyone with grand stories of London or any other of my destinations. This is not a particularly pithy ending to a blog post, but it’s all I got.