The underpinnings of modern travel might be traced to the 19th century, when Victorian ladies traveled with their husbands to exotic lands. Some were amateur biologists hunting for rare butterflies. There were the teeming masses of young ladies, who took their requisite tours of Europe to "finish" their edges. There were sturdy missionary mavens conquering the unclean souls of Africa and South America and Asia.
But what of the solitary middle-aged female traveler of the late 20th and early 21st century – that new breed of self-inventing heroines made famous by books like Under the Tuscan or Eat, Pray, Love. For these women, the pleasure of travel is mixed with the interior voyage of self-discovery.
My friend Bonnie has sailed the world with her husband Earl, aboard their 65-foot schooner Bonnie Lynn. She says she knows the exact moment when she realized she was a traveler: “I was five years old in Michigan. And I remember looking around me and thinking, “I’m outta here!” I couldn’t wait until I was 18.”
So why do I want to travel? I could come up with several plausible reasons, but they all boil down to one basic premise: I want to be the actual heroine of my story and I want to get new chapter headings.
Based on my last trip to Europe – 10 days solo in the Netherlands about eight years ago – the experience of arriving will hardly be the thing of legend. In fact, it was during that trip I first felt my invisibility, a haze from which I suspect I will never emerge. I was a ghost strolling down the Prinsenstraat, made corporeal only momentarily when I asked a rushing Dutchman for directions, answered always in that clinically polite, perfect English.
I was a shadow preventing the frustrated masses from seeing works on paper at the Van Gogh Museum. I was both lover and beloved when I bought myself two huge armfuls of tulips at the flower market, took them back to my small room and spent the whole night just looking at them. No one in the Netherlands sought me out for conversation or met
my eyes. I ate alone, drank alone, wandered the botanical gardens behind a pair of American girls just so I could hear them talk. … The Dutch are not renowned bottom pinchers. But, as my secret agenda was to meet A Rich Dutch Architect, the man I unaccountably felt was my destiny, I feel Holland failed me.One exception: That trip did renew my friendship with Mr. Marlboro – whom I first met secretly one night at a Brown Café in Amsterdam, then quickly succumbed to during the day. I remember the company of a specific cigarette in Deventer as I looked out my hotel window with Scriabin on the radio behind me. I remember the Delft Marlboro that I swore would be my last. I remember bumming a smoke from a young man in a tuxedo outside a pub (wedding?) who would have given me the whole pack. (I did eventually give Smoke the heave, but he is always lurking.)
I tend to think travel is more of an outward adventure for men. They like to attain destinations. They like to know the distances between cities. They get worked up about the history of places. Their pride is caught up in their ability to negotiate hotels and money and streets and waiters, all of which invariably make them grouchy.
It is different for women. We need the exhilaration of not knowing where we’re going. We crave the melancholy of moving. We ride on trains and stew over our choices. We find a rare tenderness for ourselves as we wake up to our thoughts outside the bus window. We want to start at the beginning. We hope to be discovered as treasures. If we’re lucky, we hope we’ll have a meal on a high hill with people who laugh easier than we do.
We travel to experience perfect moments.
Train photo courtesy of Jason Niedle's travel blog.
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