I fell in love with traveling when I was a kid, growing up in Argentina. In this vast, mostly flat country, with good roads and services, car trips where de rigeur and my family was very much into packing the car and hitting the road. My parents took me in such a trip to Mar del Plata when I was only 9-months old, and many more trips of the sort followed. The ones I most remember are to Mendoza, when I was 5, to Bariloche and the Patagonia at 8, Tandil and Ayacucho, for the "Calf Festival" at 9, Uruguay and Brazil at 10 and Iguazu Falls at 11. These were intersected by weeks at the beaches in San Clemente del Tuyú, Villa Gezel and Mar del Plata.
When we came to America things changed quite a bit. We didn't have much money and my sister was in dyalisis, which made traveling difficult. Still, we did manage a trip to San Diego and Tijuana and a few to Disneyland ☺
My love of traveling resumed when I had the opportunity of taking a year abroad during college. My major was Egyptian Archaeology, so I predictably decided to go to Egypt. My parents very generously offered to pay for a week in Europe on my way to Egypt, but I figured that money would buy me six weeks in the Middle East so I went off to Syria and Jordan instead. I was 20 and this was my first trip alone and as a budget traveler. It was scary at first - I remember crying on the plane from Paris to Damascus, knowing that I was getting there late at night, I spoke no Arabic and had no idea how I'd get to town - but soon I became a traveling aficionado. Knowing that I could negotiate my way around a very foreign country was extremely liberating.
That year, I traveled throughout Egypt (though I never made it to the Oasis), and spent some time in Greece and Turkey as well. I went back to college, and the following summer I got a gig with the now defunct Berkeley Guides writing the Yucatan chapter for their new Mexico guide. I got to spend 11 weeks traveling throughout the peninsula and had a blast (though also discovered that traveling solo, specially when you are working, can be quite lonely).
Time went by and I re-acquainted myself with Mike, we were soon going out and it didn't take long before we got married. Mike had traveled a little bit on his own as well. He'd been an Air Force brat and he lived in England until he was 8. His mother took him throughout Europe when he was little, but he doesn't remember anything of the trip (I, on the other hand, have vivid memories of my trip to Mendoza at 5). The summer after his freshman year in college, he went to visit his dad who was stationed in England again, and traveled quite a bit throughout England and Europe. However, other hobbies (motorcycling, parachuting) had become much more important to him than traveling. That was about to change.
We had our honeymoon in Guatemala and started a tradition of going abroad almost every year. As Mike was working and usually he didn't get more than 2 or 3 weeks of vacation, our trips were of necessity short, which meant that usually we moved very fast. We spent our first anniversary in Spain, where Mike joined me after my solo sojourn to Morocco, and discovered the wonders of the Basque country and Basque cuisine and the delights of the Andaluzian sun (specially, after the wind and rain pushed us out of San Sebastian). The following year, we did an apartment exchange with a French travel writer from Paris, and got to pretend to be Parisians for a month. Every morning we went to the boulangerie for bread and pastries, before walking to the metro and in a discovery adventure of yet another part of the city. We did a few day-trips to other parts of France (wine-tasting in Beaune was a particular favorite) and in all had an unforgetable experience.
Later trips were sometimes linked to "work" related issues. I did an internship in Lima one summer, and then Mike joined me for a trip to some of the most interesting sights of Peru (Nazca, the Puno and Cuzco regions, Trujillo and Chan-Chan). Another summer, we had a fateful trip to Nicaragua (we got mugged!) after I did a 2-week course in San Jose Costa Rica. I also spent a couple of weeks in Ecuador, and got to see a little bit of Italy (mostly Rome, Milan & San Remo), Geneva, Germany (Nuremberg), Holland (The Hague & Amsterdam) and Rwanda, while attending conferences there.
We also got to visit our "pet" countries. Mike had been interested in Cambodia since he had work in the Amnesty International South-East Asian co-group in college, and we finally go to go there after I graduated law school. We visited the amazing ruins around Angkor Wat and the terrifying remains of the Khmer Rouge regime in Phnom Phen, and then spent a week hanging out at the beach in Ko Chang, Thailand, followed by a few days of shopping in Bangkok.
I had always wanted to go to India, and in 2001 I decided to take a sabbatical from work and hit the sub-continent. I spent about a month and a half traveling by myself through Northern India (including Sikkim and Kashmir) before Mike joined me for a trip to Rajasthan. I didn't like India very much, but Mike loved it. It was good that I did the trip then, though, as a few months after we came back I got pregnant - and India is not a place where I would take a small child.
Our most "unusual" trip, was probably the cruise we took to Alaska, 6-days aboard the mega-ship Vision of the Seas. To our amazement (we are budget travelers after all) we had a great time. The food was good, the ship huge and interesting, and the knowledge that we didn't have to do anything (no searching for hotels, restaurants, sights) but hung out extremely relaxing. I certainly want to take another cruise again.
And this puts us here. All these trips were done while we were childless. But now there are three of us. Our beautiful daughter Michaela Libertad was born April 1st, 2002. We have the whole traveling thing down when it's just the two of us, but how will it be traveling with a baby? Stay tuned.