Tag: Jeju Island

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I’d like to say all my bags are packed and I’m ready to go. I’m not. That is what I will do today.

I used to love travel. I remember the excitement in getting ready for a big trip. And there were some very big trips in my life.

From my home base in Canada, I flew to Sri Lanka for a three month walking trek and sojourn through India and Nepal. On another occasion, I flew to Seoul Korea to connect with my family on tiny and dazzling beautiful black sand Jeju Island off South Korea’s coast.

Then there was the southern sojourn to Argentina to take a ten day horse trek across the Andes. And I once flew due North and landed in Iqaluit, Nunavut for several frost filled days to attend the Arctic Winter Games.

Many writers laud the benefits of travel. I do. It changes you. It broadens your perspective on so many things. It can shatter the illusion of cultural superiority that some secretly harbor if they have not travelled very far from their home base.

One look at a carved monument in almost any country should knock that out of your system pretty quickly. Not always, of course. But often.

Travel is a kind of education that you cannot replicate by reading books. Books stimulate the imagination. Travel stimulates the senses. Nothing could replace the overwhelming sights and sounds of a spice market in New Delhi, India.

Celebrating Holi, the festival of colors, is one of the most unique occasions I’ve ever taken part in. In under an hour, me and my traveling companions were physically drenched in a dozen colors from handfuls of special chalk thrown at us. Deliberately!

As you wander the streets of New Delhi (or anywhere in India on that unique, special holiday), everyone is equally streaked with multiple colors of dust.

Indians generally have a great sense of occasion. Nothing can match the style and splendor of an Indian wedding drenched in rich fabrics, brilliant colors and enticing smells.

When most of my college buddies were working at traditional summer jobs after the term was over, I spent every summer traveling on some pretense or another. Europe. First as a waitress in a massive tourist hotel and the following summer as a student. Then Egypt as a student after my third year.

After graduation, I spent several months traipsing through Asia. So many indelible memories. So much experience and learning – mostly good.

I am leaving my country again. This time, on a more permanent basis. We cannot predict the future with flawless accuracy but we can make some educated guesses.

For me that means the next few years will be spent among my continent mates directly to our South. Living in the USA at this juncture in history is an ongoing daily education. I won’t make a qualitative call on what I’m learning there.

Travel brings you home with new eyes. You see everything that was familiar and there before but differently somehow.

It is easy for me to appreciate the old song, “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree?” Travel was like an addiction where the more I did it, the more I craved. I deemed it a healthy addiction and only now see the cravings diminishing somewhat.

Hours from now, I’ll be winging my way South to rejoin my husband and put this country in the rearview mirror for awhile.

When the jet place departs, I fully expect my bags to be packed and ready to go.

As ready as I’ll ever be at any rate.

Happy 35th Birthday, Katie Mac!

Daughter’s birthday today. Her 35th. A milestone of sorts. The fact she has been on the planet for three-point-five decades seems a significant chunk of life worth celebrating.

Poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: “Your children come through you, but not from you.” My Katie couldn’t be a clearer example. She is very much her own person. For that quality alone, I am delighted by her and having her on the planet. She is a little like me, as genetics inevitably dictate, but mostly she is like herself.

Day by day, Katie discovers with more certainty who she really is. And what she really believes. And what she really wants. Those are not automatic givens for anyone. A lot of people flop around in life without much internal structure and an ill-defined self-image.

Katie was literally a miracle starting from the circumstances of her conception. She outwitted the murderous intentions of an IUD to be born on the planet. As miraculous to me anyway, she was a VBAC birth. That is, she was born vaginally after her brother’s C-section two years earlier. That birth protocol was rare back in the day. And she topped off all of the other improbabilities by being born on her grandmother’s birthday. Talk about a suck-up.

As a toddler, Katie shimmered. In her christening pictures, she looks sweet and angelic in a white floor-length lace and ribbon confection of a dress. I believe that sweet, angelic, and loving spirit she exuded that day is who she is at core.

Me and Katie did not have a particularly normal day-to-day parent-child experience, but we did have some adventures. I flew to Paris with her during a school break to get her to Austria where she would au pair for several weeks as a summer nanny. We rented a car at D’Orly Airport. As I haltingly made my way into Parisian traffic, I remember being hyper-vigilant about driving in Europe for the very first time.

It was Katie who spied a traffic sign directing us toward Versailles Palace. The playground of King Louis XIV and his court should have been on our list of must-sees. With no set itinerary, Katie and I were happy to stop and wander for a few hours through the luxurious palace and its gardens. https://en.chateauversailles.fr/

On another occasion, I flew from Ottawa, Canada and she from Christchurch, New Zealand to meet up in Los Angeles for the last post-Oscars taping of the Oprah show at the Kodak Theater in 2011.

Most memorable, beyond seeing Oprah live, was a major earthquake in Christchurch that occurred the very day Katie was supposed to fly to LA. With communications out of NZ badly damaged, it took hours before I learned she had safely boarded her flight and was on her way to Los Angeles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrBA5ddfMc

One cold winter morning, we headed East in my new-to-me RVR SUV to drive across North America starting in Calgary, Alberta. We headed straight south into Montana and drove across the northern United States until we hit Long Island. Surprisingly, road conditions were summer-like for most of the way until we hit Iowa when a snowstorm hit us right between the headlights.

On another of Katie’s birthdays, we stayed at a dude ranch in BC and rode horses through a thick, tall forest. From the forest’s edge, we watched black bears gamboling at a distance in a large open field.

On one of my special birthdays, we climbed Seongsan Ilchubong Mountain on Jeju Island in South Korea. Had Katie not been there, quietly but firmly pushing me upwards on the treacherously steep trail to that peak, I m not sure I would have made it to the top. Which was so worth seeing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seongsan_Ilchulbong

A few days later, Katie and I flew to Hong Kong so I could visit her workplace. The best description for the place is rustic. Right beside the floor mattress I was directed to sleep on, a baby pit viper was coiled up in a clear Rubbermaid container with a top riddled with breathing holes. That it was really incapable of inflicting serious harm on a human was slight comfort. I put in a rather fitful night.

In the intervening years until she bore down on her academic pursuits, Katie amassed an impressive resume of international travel from New Zealand, to Buenos Aires, Argentina to the Yukon Territory and the Arctic Circle. Always with a job and with a goal in mind.

She graduated from the University of British Columbia two years ago with a degree in geography. She now applies that training to her job in a technology startup doing infrastructure assessment projects for engineering firms. In the past year, she has bought a house, is at work on several entrepreneurial ideas, and manages her household and business affairs well.

I am so damned proud of her. And happy for her though she isn’t always happy herself. She is a learning machine. She is saucy, sharp, fun, super-bright, fashion-forward, and athletic and she never quits when the going gets rough. She is logical and a problem-solver. I’m not sure that she yet fully knows how important those qualities will be to her in the future.

I sure hope she knows how vitally important she is to me. And to a buncha other people. Her older brother, for instance, who is a going concern in his own right.

Happy Birthday, BBH! (Have I finally made up for your screwed-up twelfth birthday? Surely an amnesty is in order what with a special birthday coming up for me, too. Think about it? :-))