My travel bug did not start a few years ago but instead was planted and nourished by my parents (all of them). Some of you may be scratching your head and eyeing your device wondering if you read that correctly. You did! After my conception, my parents married twice and not to each other. Lol So needless to say I’m blessed with bonus moms and dads; in addition to a ton of siblings. So at a young age, my mom and dad #2 would travel every year to Philadelphia, straight through. We would only stop for gas and bathroom breaks…most of the time. When we got to Philly we would either stay with my grandmother or dad #2’s ex-sister in law.
Yes, I said it. My family is truly a blended family. We would stay with Aunt Crystal and Uncle Randy often. My brother’s mom and her husband would come over and we would have cookouts and swim parties. Our parents and extended family showed us what it meant to love, forgive, and grow. Some people couldn’t do it and that’s fine. Some make it impossible for you to maintain a cordial relationship let alone a friendship of any kind.
My dad would get my siblings and me (sometimes my cousins as well) and almost every year we would travel to Atlanta or the beach in Florida. The other great thing about my parents is that they are big on pictures and believe in capturing memories. As I got older traveling was a way of life and a camera was a package deal. I took my daughter on her first road trip when she was a baby because I felt it was important for her to be used to traveling, second nature. Boy, did we travel.
I got my daughter so accustomed to traveling she paced herself with drinking (she took sips) so that she only needed to use the bathroom when we stopped for gas (every now and then we had to make additional stops but not often). She rarely complained about the ride and enjoyed the adventure as much as I did. Just think, the number of electronic devices we use for entertainment now was unavailable then.
There have been so many trips that I have been blessed to travel with parents and as they get older I appreciate even more the time they took to enrich our lives and show us that there is more to what we know and what we have. In other words, our lives no longer had boundaries but became limitless!
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