American Gypsy, Part I

The style and length of the previous post should be the exception to the rule. I expect these in general to be much more fragmentary, brief, and full of incomplete entities interrupting each other.

Here is the question: What happened to the traveling soul of the United States individual? With the exception of the Native Americans, aren’t we all within a few generations more or less of ancestors willing to leave their homeland to brave the odds for the sake of something potentially better? But though we are theoretically selection-biased towards seeking the new, we seem now to be the least intrepid of developed nations.

Redhead and I were at the park the other day, and while Oz was playing we were speaking with a sweet middle-aged lady who was declaring how lovely her first trip to Italy had been, how it had been a packaged deal - a tour - and that everything had been planned for her and she hadn’t had to figure anything out. My Redhead and I were polite, but noted later in the car how that what she was describing was exactly the opposite of at least a large part of what had been seeking out in our own traveling experiences. We want to actually experience the world, not just see it as a museum. Good traveling should be an education - and figuring it all out along the way in real-time instills among other things the understanding you that you have less to fear than you thought you did. There are travelers and there are tourists, but the two are worlds apart. There is no education like real traveling.