For a long time, I thought my obsession with travel was a personal short coming. If I simply tried harder, I could stop. Then I learned that wanderlust is genetic. Bottom line, my parents did this to me.

Which brings me to the piece below that I wrote for the Book Passage Travel Writers Conference writing contest in August of 2015. The top three submissions were published—mine in a now defunct online travel magazine. (Clearly, I didn’t finish first.) Yet it was my first published writing, and frankly, I still love it.

It may explain some of the past—and even more of the future. Our current road trip is taking an unexpected turn as I write this. Blame it on the pesky wanderlust gene. More on this shortly. Until then, I hope you enjoy.

My Father’s Gift

By: Julie Callahan

The bus rumbled to life and shifted into gear, pulling out of the parking lot while I shrieked and sobbed. A sputtering of puffs of black smoke bellowed from the tail pipe as my father pressed his face to the window and waved—not so much a happy wave or an I’ll see you in three weeks wave, but more of a please don’t cry pleading. Then the bus turned the corner, and he was gone.

My mother held my hand, “Julie. Please. Stop screaming. Let’s go home.” By that evening, as I snuggled on the couch in my pink footie pajamas and watched The Wonderful World of Color (eventually to be rebranded The Wonderful World of Disney), I had forgotten my father’s traumatic departure. When the phone rang, I noted the surprise in my mother’s voice. “Are you sure? What time will you be here?” She hung up and said, “Your father will be home just after midnight.” I smiled, but inside I felt guilty. My tantrum had resulted in him canceling his dream trip to Africa.

He concocted a story that he had sold his private safari to someone at the airport. For years, I believed him until I realized that no one ventured to Kennedy airport to buy a safari from a stranger. My screaming, and his sacrifice, became part of our family lore—repeated so often there is little wonder it is my youngest and clearest memory. Yet somehow, this story created a bond between my father and me.

He was a stone mason and proud of his craft. Summer evenings, we would pile into the car and drive by houses he had built listening to his stories: a beach escape for Katherine Hepburn, a Sing Sing style enclave for a mob kingpin, and a rambling colonial where a lead fashion designer entertained his models. At dinner, he reminded us that when he died, he wanted a one word descriptor on his tombstone—Mason.

Years later, I was in Greece with my own family when I learned my father had died. I sat on the acropolis looking out at the ancient ruins, the smog cloaked city, and the distant Aegean Sea and cried as I had 40 years earlier chasing a bus when I thought a three-week trip constituted forever. My father had spent his retirement years in near constant, far-flung travel, including an African safari shortly after my mother’s death. His blatant willingness to go anywhere allowed me to evoke him everywhere.

After I returned to the United States, I visited my father’s grave. I had not thought of our dinner conversations in years, yet carved into granite was his one word descriptor—Traveler. He taught me one final lesson, your one word descriptor can evolve, even more, it should evolve.

Instead of an African safari, that next summer we loaded into the car and headed west from our New Jersey home. Disneyland had recently opened in California near Los Angeles. My father said it was “thoughtless” of him to set off for Africa; we would spend the money traveling as a family. He believed that you never flew anyplace if you could drive, so we would stop along the way and see as much of the country as a three week trip allowed: rafting the Snake River in front of the Tetons, memorizing the names of the presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, and dancing with a Native American tribe on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Through the corn fields of the midwest, my sister and I created an imaginary divider in the center of the backseat and karate chopped each other when one of us crossed into the other’s space. Being four years older, my sister insisted I sit behind our father since she realized when we got completely out of hand, he would swat the air directly behind him. If he made contact, it was always a slap on my thigh. During these fits, as he flung his hand into the back seat and the car veered over the yellow line, my mother would yell, “Harry, stop. You’ll kill us all.” He never lost his temper outside the confines of the DeVille, but inside the car was another matter. I’d remember this years later when my own children created havoc in the back of our Explorer as we repeated those car trips from my youth.

My father had discovered AAA and used their trip planning service—a long, narrow book of maps bound at the top in spiraled plastic and with the route highlighted in bright yellow. Each page represented a few hundred mile segment of our journey. As the country flew past my window, I flipped the pages of the map measuring our progress the way I monitor the trajectory through a story by the movement of my bookmark. AAA recently announced the end of these paper maps which makes me pity a generation who will never flip through a trip, advance to the last page, look up, and realize they have arrived at their destination.

During the ride, my mother entertained us with stories of the park Walt Disney had created: a huge castle for Cinderella, an enormous man-made tree—“bigger than any in our yard”—with handmade leaves, and an African safari complete with elephants and alligators. Once we arrived, my father gamely rode the African Queen replica as it sputtered through a muddy, backwater lot and a khaki-clad guide shot off a cap pistol and yelled, “Get down! Elephants!!” Dad smiled and said with a laugh, “Look! A safari! Just like the real thing!!” Even then, I suspected the mechanical snapping alligators were nothing like the real thing. I remember the park as a disappointment, yet had the good sense to pretend it was the most magical place I had ever visited.

My three children are grown now. Their entire childhood, my husband and I carted them across the United States in loop de loops which eventually covered all 50 states. As they groaned about the car trips, I replied, “Why fly when you see so much more driving.” We drove to Seattle and took the ferry up the passage to Juneau, circumnavigated the never-ending coast of Lake Superior, and saw our first bear in Sequoia National Park after days of anticipation. At some point during the trip, I told the story of my dad’s aborted safari to Africa and the subsequent long ride across the United States to visit Disneyland. My kids groaned, “Mom, you’ve told us that story already!” At times, I swatted into the backseat as they fought like hoodlums.

In 2011, my husband and I sold our home and possessions and moved to Bratislava, Slovakia for my job with IBM. My father’s boyhood best friend wrote me a letter, “Your dad would be so proud of you.” He enclosed a map of a trip he took through the eastern half of Europe before the fall of communism. “You may like this. It’s from my trip to your new home.” He had marked the route with a bright yellow highlighter. I framed it and hung it over my desk. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Descriptors no longer relevant to an evolving world.

Trains replaced cars as our favorite mode of transportation as we traveled around Central Europe. We met people from around the world sharing seats in our second class cabin: a Japanese university professor, a south African expat who relocated to Bratislava, an Irishman with a penchant for storytelling. Train travel was so much richer than flying. Two years after moving to Slovakia, we moved to Budapest, Hungary. Then, after four years in Central Europe, we returned to the United States where I retired, we sold our possessions, and set off with two suitcases to live for three months in a 270 square-foot apartment in Paris. There I attended the Paris Writers Workshop. I introduced myself with the one word descriptors which I had used for years:

IBMer, Retiree, Mother, Wife, and to this I added a new one, Nomad.

My husband and I travel full-time now. That trip to Disneyland didn’t change my life, it defined my life. We talk about buying a car and driving back and forth across the United States yet again. Maybe we will stop in Disneyland so I can measure the depth of my father’s sacrifice one final time. I will feel the warmth of his hand as he held me tightly while we drifted past the Teton mountain range on a raft. I will smell the fragrance of pines mixed with Old Spice cologne. I will hear his voice as he recounts our story to his friends, “Did I ever tell you about the time I almost went on safari to Africa?”

I will write a story about it. It will be my father’s final gift.

Categories: Ruminations

Tags: Expat life, nomadic retirement, the world inbetween, Unusual retirement options