So Much Earth, So Little Time
I’m not sure if this holds true, or if it’s something I made up, but it seems to me like the desire to travel isn’t something that’s instilled in Hispanic households. It seems like most of my parents’ generation in the US are immigrants who have enough on their plate with trying to make ends meet for their family to even worry about something as luxurious as traveling. I’m conscious and eternally grateful for all of my parents’ sacrifices, and I’m also grateful that to some degree, they were able to succeed and live a life comfortable enough that vacations and the desire to learn more about the world started enticing us.
My mom is from Northern Mexico and my dad is from Southern Mexico, so a lot of the traveling we did in my childhood was back and forth through the Motherland, visiting family and getting in touch with our roots. My memories of a lot of these trips are blurry, at best, but I’ve flipped through photo albums and have seen pictures of us in Culiacan, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, Mexico City, Monterrey, and lots of towns and places in between. Even though I don’t remember the details of these travels, the feeling of getting to know different places and cultures and ways of life has stuck with me throughout my life. Besides Mexico trips, my parents also tried their best to let us explore our new American home and we were able to visit some of the big US landmarks on road trips and vacations. These pushes from my family were what I believe sparked my curiosity for the world and developed my sense of adventure.
Growing up and being educated by an American culture also taught me that traveling was something to aspire to and made exotic vacations a normality. Cut to 18-year old me, freshly graduated from high school and riding the high of quickly approaching freedom and opportunity. In my hands is my brand-new passport, its pages empty of stamps but full of possibilities. The summer between high school and freshmen year of college I embarked on my first overseas journey as part of a trip planned by a travel company for students. It was a week-long trip where I got to visit Ireland, England and France and it was completely magical. I was touristy and had an anxiety attack on a plane (maybe I’ll explore that in a different blog, just going to glaze over it for now), got homesick, tried escargot, learned a lot of history I quickly forgot, got legally drunk for the first time, and made friends that I will cherish those unique experiences with but will probably never see again. It was an incredible feeling to see iconic landmarks such as the Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower that I had only seen in textbooks, yet here I was standing in front of them IRL and life would just continue on as normal afterwards. It was surreal and I loved it.
Nowadays, it’s a balance between full-time work, visiting family, resting, and saving up money to be able to keep visiting new places. Not that this is a set pace, but our schedules are pretty typical for 9-5 jobs, so the best thing for us to do is to plan for one big vacation a year. I realize that there are lots of hidden and amazing places left for me to explore in my own country, so I’m trying to sprinkle that into the mix of trips abroad. I like to think I’m on the path towards becoming well-traveled,but the truth is, the only countries besides Mexico that I’ve traveled to are European ones. Why are they so tiny and jammed together??? And while, there are still many European countries I’d like to visit, there’s also a whole beautiful world to explore. I’m also starting to be a lot more conscious of my motivations when traveling. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of beautiful places, designed specifically for Western tourists, but I try to remember that I enjoy traveling for the wonder of this breathtaking Earth, for the experiences that only certain places can provide, and for a growing empathy and understanding of how everybody in the world moves through life.
Most of the people in my life now are just as stoked as me to continue traveling and I’m grateful that we are in a place in life where that’s an accessible reality to us. I’m by no means an avid traveler or a luxury traveler, I’m simply a girl on a budget and a mission. A mission to learn, and grow, and explore, and experience things through traveling that I’ll cherish through this quick life.