The only thing I could tell you about Connecticut before last Sunday is that every time we drive through Bridgeport, I think about how it’s a great reporter’s town: rundown, gritty, and full of news.
Sunday’s impromptu excursion to Manchester, Conn., just east of Hartford, blew a hole in my narrow view of the Constitution State. A worrisome car-trouble call from our daughter and son-in-law turned into a fun and relaxed picnic in Wickham Park — a beautiful green oasis where we ate, laughed, and took turns holding our 5-month-old granddaughter.
We took the long way home on Route 44, a winding, hilly meander I highly recommend that took us past cows, old tractors, strange signs like the one that read, “Guns & God Since 1776,” leafy lanes, and Pomfret School, a bucolic hilltop campus where tuition is $64,000 a year.
Relaxed from the ride and our side jokes about country living, and excited by having my senses sharpened by new sights and a new experience, I said goodbye to Route 44 wishing travel was back in my life.
I’m not talking about obligation travel — you know, driving to see this person or rushing off to honor this family or friend obligation.
Those excursions are important and usually filled with fun. I’m talking about heading off to see a place I’ve never been before and being around people I’ve never met. I’m talking about don’t-forget-your-passport travel. I’m talking about adventure.
I come from a family of travelers who never shirk from adventure. I rode as a child in the back of a station wagon splashing through a Mexican river in the dark. My dad’s name is on a plaque at the Amazon River’s headwaters. My mother took a train trip in the People’s Republic of China that probably wouldn’t be sanctioned by Chinese officials today. My brother has traveled to four continents and has climbed to the top of pyramids. My nephew gazed at Mount Everest’s summit from a nearby precipice.
Every time I have traveled beyond my comfort zone, the adventure has changed my life. My thinking, my attitude towards people, my fears and hopes have all been altered by going somewhere I had never been before.
My dad liked to say, “Let your home be a mast, not an anchor.” Ironically, he ended up a hermit in his home in the last years before his death.
Fortunately for me, my wife takes those words to heart. She embraces a travel adventure whether it involves ordering cheese steaks from the two best places in Philly (Pat’s and Geno’s) or bumping down a dirt road in the Navajo nation (OK, she wasn’t too thrilled about that one).
Travel has taken me into dangerous situations and places — a beer party that escalated into a knife fight in Canada, a gun brandished on a Guatemalan street, and there was the time an angry and extremely large London fruit vendor roughed me up after I stole a grape.
Those encounters and others far from home have quickened my pulse and recalibrated my smug view of the world around me. The most accomplished people in the business I chose for a career always told me that the best reporters aren’t the ones who know everything; they are the ones who freely admit they know nothing.
I puzzled over those words until travel forced me to dump my assumptions and perceptions of the world beyond the small place I inhabit.
I thought I knew a lot about war from books I read and veterans I talked to until I stood in a small Bosnian village and looked at buildings with almost every square foot of wall space scarred and pockmarked by bullets.
I thought I knew about generosity until I met people who drove me for free to places I never heard of and then offered me food and introduced me to their families.
There is magic in the world and the first stop on the road to discovering it is the passport window at the post office. COVID-19 has cast a dark pall over travel. Rest assured, the sun will shine again and we will be back on the road, rolling toward adventure, and meeting plenty of people just as eager to meet us as we are to meet them.
