What Travel Means to Me

Getting Back on the Saddle

Last week, I hit a wall.  Two weeks after launching this blog, I was overwhelmed with so many things I wanted to write and post.  I got caught up with the logistics of establishing a blog.  I was reading other travel blogs and wanted Viajera Filipina to be as polished, entertaining and informative.  I was working on social media presence, for people to get to know the blog.   I was immersing myself in online courses to learn the craft from some brilliant minds in the blogging world.  I have so many plans and goals for the site.  I wanted to do it right.   And I wanted to do it right now.

Then, I shut down.

I started to question whether I could pull it all off.  I was wracked with doubt.  What if no one cares about what I write?   What if my writing is not good enough.  What if the people I want to reach never find my site?  What’s up with all these SEO strategies?  What if nothing becomes of this?

I had to step away away and reconnect with my focus, my reason for starting this in the first place.   I stared at my logo and tried to get aligned again with my WHY.  It was sitting right there:  Inspiring Filipinas to see the world.  That has always been my intention.  Reading Martine de Luna’s Blissful Blogging Series and going through Jeff Goins’ Intentional Blog  helped me get clear on this again.  So I took a deep breath, cleared out the doubts, reminded myself that this was going to be a long process, and got back on the saddle.

What Travel Means to Me

I wrote in my About page that my first foray in traveling was summer vacations with my family in the mountain city of Baguio in the Philippines.  Travel was not a big priority in my family.   We belonged to the middle class, with my father working in pharmaceutical sales and my mother initially running a little eatery and eventually becoming an insurance agent.  I was an only child until I was 13.   We enjoyed city life in Manila: hanging around in the malls and eating out.

But around the second week of May every year, my Papa would load us up in the car and we would make our way up to Baguio.  With Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis crooning in the background, we passed by rice fields, farms and little towns in our five-hour drive.  When we got to the city that was a former American military R&R hill station , we would walk up and down the hilly streets, shop in the market, indulge in local treats, and generally bask in the cool mountain breeze.    Those yearly Baguio trips, with an occasional side trip to the beach town of La Union, were some of my fondest childhood memories.

 

Shortly after my brother was born, my father’s company was sold and he was out of a job for a period of time.   Vacations took a back seat and was pretty much forgotten for a while.   Studying at a girls school with affluent classmates, it was  also around that time that I was  exposed me to people who rode planes to travel.   Up to that point, all my trips were either by car or bus.  My friends went on shopping trips to Hong Kong, getaways to the pristine beaches of Cebu and Boracay, and summer vacations in the United States.  Whatever bit of envy I had, I hid well because I didn’t want my father to feel bad about not being able to provide that for our family.   I simply accepted the fact that travel was for the rich, and our family had other priorities at that time.

Life moved quickly, between high school and college.  Any out of town trips would typically be a company sponsored excursion at my father’s current job.  I was still tied to my family for any traveling that I did.   Until one summer, when a group of college friends organized a trip that took us to the northern provinces, including my beloved Baguio and all the way to the surfing town of Pagudpud.   That was my first big trip on my own.  I felt like such a grown up, and a cool one at that.  We hung out on the beach at night, drank Rum Coke, wrangled a couple of inebriated folks who wanted to go for a midnight swim in the ocean, then passed out under the stars.  It felt like a scene from those coming of age teen movies.   Good times.

Coming to America

Not too long after college, I was hired and petitioned to come over to Georgia on a working visa as a physical therapist.  My family saw me off at the airport and I took my first plane ride ever alone, at age 25.   I got on a Northwest flight, giddy with excitement.  I walked around the Narita airport, trying to soak in as much as I can during the brief stopover in Japan.  Soon, I landed in Atlanta and started my new life.

During my first year, a college friend drove from her home in North Carolina to take me on my first American road trip.   Goldie and I went from Georgia, crossed over to Alabama, then stopped for a night in Biloxi, Mississippi.  She booked for us to stay at what seemed to me was a haunted old house.  Father Ryan House turned out to be a highly regarded bed and breakfast in the West Beach Historic District facing the Gulf Coast.    Built in 1841, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was an elaborately restored stately home named after Father Abram Ryan, Poet Laureate of the Confederacy, who lived there for a time.  As scared as I was to be staying in a centuries old home at that time, I was later devastated to find out that it was completely destroyed during Hurricane Katrina.

That trip, which later on took us to New Orleans, Louisiana and  Houston, Texas, taught me something new about travel.  It made me appreciate my adoptive country, for its history, culture and regional flair.  It was then, after driving around two thousand miles round trip in a span of 5 days, did I get up close and personal with my new home.   Later trips within Georgia and the South, especially to the charming Southern cities of Savannah, Charleston (South Carolina) and Asheville (North Carolina), opened my eyes to the many unique features, attractions and experiences that were all a car ride away.

 

 

A Whole New World

In 2005, I met and married Glen.  Little did I know at that time that he was going to do an Aladdin and take me on many magic carpet rides.  A history nerd, Glen had an insatiable thirst for seeing places that he’s read about in books and saw on the History Channel.  Little by little, we made our way  around the globe, starting with the more familiar places likes England, then progressing to countries like Egypt and Peru – places that seemed worlds away for the girl that I was growing up in Manila.

During our travels, I’ve learned to take in the world through his eyes.  He has a knack for knowing dates, names, and events as if straight out of a textbook.  That, along his gift of making these details easy to understand and relatable, made me appreciate old ruins, elaborate churches, grand palaces, and stoic monuments.

 

Getting To Know You

As spectacular as the places we’ve been to are, the interaction with the locals and getting to know their way of life have been just as fascinating.  Seeing them in their natural habitat, watching them go about their day to day business, eavesdropping on their conversations (most of which I don’t understand anyway) about what their concerns and preoccupations were – these help me truly understand that I am part of the human race.

I saw myself in a little Peruvian girl selling trinkets with her mother.  I felt the weight of the day on my fellow passengers on the train in the evening rush hour in Rome.  I empathized with the Japanese bride who kept her excitement under poised composure as she sat for photos with her groom after their ceremony at a Shinto temple.  I shared the indignation of a middle-aged Icelandic man over ineffective bureaucrats in their government.  I beamed with excitement as I danced around a public square in Zagreb with some new Croatian friends during a festival.

 

 

 

There is still so much out there to discover and experience.   Having traveled extensively in recent years has stirred up a passion in me to see more of the world.  But beyond that, I’m just as eager for others to see it as well.   The importance and relevance of travel in our lives are shaped and formed by our personal backgrounds and experiences.  While what travel means to you may be different from what it means to me, I know for sure that if we allow it, travel has the potential to help us better ourselves individually and collectively.