To Live is to Travel

When my mother shipped me alone by plane for my first out-of-town Christmas vacation when I was 10, our neighbors were aghast by her audacity.  It was almost a mortal sin if parents let their children out of their sight at that time.  If child abuse was a buzz word at that period, my mother would have faced a child abuse case from the Department of Social Welfare.  My mother was that kind of person.  She was ahead of her time.  She wanted her children to experience the things she did not experience having  married at the age of 18.  Love of traveling is actually one of the things I learned from my mother.

I caught the travel bug instantly and I fell in love with riding planes.  I could still remember today what the cloud formation was as if it were just yesterday.   I could remember the empty space beside me because the flight attendant would constantly check on me.  She was probably thinking I would dash anywhere inside the airplane if she does not watch me even if I was already  seat belted.   That did not happen, fortunately.  I was mesmerized with the picture outside the window, that I could not think of anything else.



I guess it also helped that my first travel destination was the Queen City of the South because I have fond memories of that first holiday I had as I was approaching that puberty stage.  I could still remember to this day the smell of the 'binignit' that I would buy from the store at the corner for our afternoon snack. That smell would bring back the sounds, the movements, the color of the neighborhood before Cebu boomed into a metro that it is now. 

That first holiday opened up the desire to travel and experience the things that I would only read in books and see in the movies.  I have embraced traveling as a part of me, even leaving the place where I had my formative years and spending the next twenty five years of my life in big cities.   To this day, traveling, whether short distances or long distances, has become a part of my way of life.  It has become sort of a therapeutic and educational undertaking for me and for as long as I live, I shall take extreme delight in packing and planning for my next destination.