If the plan holds, I’m traveling to Tel Aviv next week for work. This will be the farthest I’ve ever traveled — by a wide margin — and I’m a bit embarrassed by that.
I grew up in the southwest U.S. — Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and back to Arizona. I traveled as most kids travel, with my parents, where my parents took us on our family vacations. The range was narrow. I went to Disneyland, I visited some family and the beaches of southern California, I stayed with my paternal grandparents at their fishing lodge high in the mountains of southern Colorado. Never more than a state or two away from home.
Over the 40+ years of my adult and professional life, I’ve traveled a good bit for work, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to add a couple of personal days on the front or back of many of those trips. With that simple modification, I’ve piggybacked on employer-paid travel to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge, walk around historic downtown Boston and Faneuil Hall, sail around Chesapeake Bay, bike the big loop through Central Park and tour the Guggenheim, sunburn by a resort pool in Orlando, tour the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, snowboard in Vancouver, and drink beers with a now-deceased member of the Grateful Dead in a blues club in Chicago.
What I’ve not done — with the exception of those business trips to Vancouver and Mexico City, a couple of day trips to Nogales, and a few boozy weekends on the beach in Puerto Peñasco — is travel outside of the U.S.
My international travel wish list is long. I’d love to visit England, land of my ancestors. Scotland looks incredible. I’ve been fascinated with China since studying Asian art in college. Likewise Italy and France for the museums and the architecture and the wine. Croatia. Prague. Monaco. I’ve read so much Chekhov, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and Turgenev that I feel like an honorary citizen of western Russia, but I long to visit and walk that countryside in real life.
For a first-timer, Israel seems like a good choice. There’s a lot of history there, most of it fairly recent. I’m not looking to be an adventure tourist, but there is enough geography and diversity that I think I can fill a week without getting bored. And, most importantly, I’m visiting a good friend who I’ve known since high school, and who now lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and kids.
I’ve started packing my bag. I have a pretty good idea of what I need to take with me, but I’m really looking forward to the experience of learning what I really need once I arrive. That’s one of the things I love most about travel — the opportunity it provides to learn more about the world, and about myself.
I hope you have the opportunity to do the same.
Safe travels!
This post is part musing, part dreaming, part experiment. I wrote roughly two-thirds of this post, and I invited Lex, a word processor and artificial intelligence collaborator, to write the other third. The Lex part is completely unedited: I wrote my musings, then I pushed a button and Lex provided a chunk of text. I pressed the “Lex button” twice in a row, and accepted what I was given exactly as it was presented.
Can you tell which parts are mine and which are AI? Let me know in the comments.
The answer to the AI riddle is posted over in A Cornucopia of Miscellany, my end-of-year wrap-up post: https://readwriterepeat.substack.com/p/a-cornucopia-of-miscellany.
This is fascinating! Like Laurie C I am guessing the last two paragraphs. My thought would be Lex would not provide the detail that was written in the previous paragraphs.