Diary of a Frustrated World Nontraveler

When I was little, my parents took me to Ocean City on the New Jersey shore in the summertime. Whenever I got bored swimming in the water or building sand castles, I would look out at the ocean's horizon. I asked my mother if you could see the other side. "Of course you can't," she said with a laugh in her voice, as moms do when they answer such questions. I could only imagine what was on the other side. I later learned that Portugal was due east of New Jersey. Beyond that were the rugged hills of Spain, the lush fields of France, the castles of Germany, and the cathedrals of Italy - places would only read about. Although I couldn't see Europe from the water's edge of the Jersey Shore, I longed to go to the Continent someday.

My first foreign excursion was a trip to Canada with my mother (who by then was divorced) and my sister, when I was fifteen. Niagara Falls had a lot of cheesy tourist traps surrounding the cascading water, but it was more memorable than Toronto, which we didn't see much of. At college, a few of my classmates enrolled in foreign studies programs. I envied those who studied Shakespeare in London or Russian culture in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then called. I considered enrolling in such a program for one five-thousandth of a second, but I knew my father wouldn't pay for it, and I didn't think there were enough groceries in the world to bag to pay my own way. During college I spent three summer vacations at the Jersey Shore - but now Seaside Heights, which wasn't nearly as nice as Ocean City. My last summer vacation before graduation was a cycling trip to Vermont with my father, which was as exotic as it got. Perhaps I wasn't ready for foreign travel; as a resident of northern New Jersey, I didn't even dare go into New York City by myself until I was 21. I'd been conditioned to ask for permission to go to places considered "dangerous," as New York had been in the eighties. "Steve, My mother said when I asked her, you're 21, of course you can go."

Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I chose to see America first, traveling to various cities such as Boston and Chicago and a few places like the Pacific Northwest and Bar Harbor, Maine. My mother and I both went to Quebec City on our second trip to Canada, but we hoped to go to Italy some time thereafter and visit the town where her father was born.

But, umm, it didn't quite work out like that.

First came 9/11, which cast a pall over international travel for awhile. I managed to take a tip to Maryland and West Virginia a month after 9/11 and rode the Acela down to Baltimore from my home in New Jersey. The Acela was a sleek, fast train that provided efficient travel, but it was no equivalent to the European "bullet trains" I'd read about and wished to ride. As it turned out, this would be, to this day, the last long recreational trip I would ever take. The various recessions and "jobless recoveries" of the past century have pretty much made it impossible for either me or my mother to travel anywhere, except for the odd weekend trip. At this point, we have, between the two of us, been to nineteen states, Washington, D.C., and two Canadian provinces. Neither of us have set foot outside North America. Mom had been to Cleveland on a business trip, and I'd traveled there to see the now somewhat discredited Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So, neither one of us have been to London, Paris, Rome or Vienna - but we have both been to Cleveland!

Incidentally, I know a woman who's boasted about having been to 36 different countries. I've only been to half as many states . . . and one thirty-sixth as many foreign countries. Yes, I'm jealous.

I do have a passport, and it's useful for ID with applications for jobs I don't get, and I trust I'll need it to vote for candidates who'll probably lose for supporting high-speed rail, but it is good for smoothing out supermarket receipts.  My mother already seems to have become resigned to never going overseas, and I feel I'd better do the same. Talk of going abroad usually gets no further than a day or two looking at Perillo tour guides and skimming through travel books from the library - one of which I paid a five-dollar overdue fine on because I'd forgotten I'd even had it. The reasons for not going include fears of terrorism, airport security, jet lag, exchange rates, yadda yadda yadda, but the main reason is this: It's too late. We can't afford it.  We now have the time, but we don't have the money.

We do still occasionally go on day or weekend trips, but on those (very) rare occasions when we go to the Jersey Shore, I don't look out at the ocean's horizon with wonder and imagination. Incidentally, when you look out at the ocean from the beach at Ocean City, you're facing southeast, not east, so you're not looking in the direction of Portugal. If you were to follow a straight line from the water's edge, you'd likely bisect the Atlantic Ocean without ever touching land. Maybe you'd graze Cabo Sao Roque in Northeastern Brazil, where Portuguese is spoken. Maybe. But most likely you'd end up going nowhere.

How symbolic.