Why is Travel Such a Valuable Experience?

We're the Bakers, from Indianapolis, 2005

I was chatting the other day with a friend who just came back from almost three weeks overseas. We got to talking about the impact travel has on us. How it opens our eyes and reminds us that our way of living, nice though it may be, isn’t the only way people can chose to live. Travel, we agreed, forces you to question your assumptions about people and life. You might end up only more confirmed in your beliefs or you might change a little.

For many of our parents, international travel was inconceivable. Few American had the time or money it took to cross the ocean by ship, see the sights and get home within a two-week vacation. There was meaning in “overseas,” a term which probably no one even uses any more, because that’s how you got anywhere and it didn’t happen quickly.

A lot of people didn’t care to travel outside of the country. Those who’d fought in Europe and in the Pacific on what my brother-in-law refers to as the “big gray ship tour” had seen enough and wanted no more of it after witnessing the horrors and deprivations of world wars. For them it was understandably hard to justify spending hard-earned money to go back and visit people who’d only recently been shooting at you.

This has all changed, of course. We have live news 24/7. We learn about political uprisings and earthquakes via Twitter. Our children think nothing of hopping a plane to Berlin or Hong Kong. Or picking up a phone and calling someone in India or Japan without mentally toting up all the long distance charges.

But still, a startling number of Americans have never traveled abroad, or even widely within their own country. Those that do don’t always make you proud, either. We’ve witnessed scenes of such appalling American arrogance and insensitivity that we wanted to crawl under a table and tell people we were from Canada.

Mama, Do These People Know Jesus?, 2005

One of my neighbors is a very accomplished, but also exceedingly conservative fellow, the kind of guy for whom a conversation of any length will eventually include some kind of diatribe about oppressive government, social welfare and intolerable taxes. He also believes America is not just the best, but the only civilized place to live. So when his college alumni group took a cruise in the Baltic Sea a while back, I couldn’t wait to hear his impression of the Scandinavian countries, those beacons of high taxation and cradle-to-grave social safety net.

People with ideas as entrenched as my neighbor’s don’t always change them very easily. But my neighbor’s eyes were at least opened a little. “You know,” he told over the fence not long after getting home, “they seem pretty happy over there. I would have never imagined that people so oppressively taxed could be at all happy. And yet they are.”

Unfortunately, I’m not sure he viewed what he saw as anything more than an anomaly, something that takes place in far away lands among people with strange customs. Before long, he was back out in the garage helping his wife paint Tea Party signs.