Overall picture: Americans have taken to roaming around the globe
Overall picture: Americans have taken to roaming around the globe
By: Bill Mead
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Posted by editor Mon Jun 11, 2007 09:37:49 PDT
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0 responses 0 comments When I was a kid, anybody in our little cornbelt town who had been to Europe was a local celebrity. We had quite a few veterans of the First World War among our neighbors, but hardly any of them had made it overseas. The U.S. got into that war in April of 1917 and it was all over by November of the following year, leaving tens of thousands of American recruits still cooling their heels at stateside training camps. My dad was one of those who got to France but all he could remember of it was being seasick going there and getting gassed by the Germans once he got there. His impression of Europe consisted almost entirely of trenches and barbed wire.
Until the middle of the 20th century, it wasn't quick or easy to cross either ocean. If you wanted to frolic in the Swiss Alps it meant almost two weeks at sea for the round trip plus however long it took to catch trains along the way. Ordinary people couldn't afford the time or the expense. If you weren't an Astor or a Vanderbilt in those days your vacation destination was more apt to be Kansas City.
Then came World War II and millions of ordinary Americans found themselves in faraway places with strange sounding names. Soon after the vets came home, jet airliners capable of spanning the Atlantic and Pacific went into service and the world shrank to the size of a bowling ball. All of a sudden, it seems, plain folks were sunning themselves on the Spanish coast or strolling the Ginza in Japan.
Until I was well past middle age, I thought of Tijuana and Vancouver as exotic foreign cities. It's a whole different ballgame for our kids and grandkids, though. Our family gatherings now turn into travelogues. We hear first person accounts of visiting Hong Kong, Bahrain, the English countryside and other places that weren't even mentioned in our geography books. Even this old man finally got airborne and saw Gay Paree and a pretty good swath of the Middle East not many years ago. I cherish memories of seeing McDonald's almost everywhere and watching Donald Duck speak Turkish on Saturday morning TV in Istanbul.
Two of our three daughters have just returned from Beijing where they attended high school graduation ceremonies for our Florida granddaughter. She spent a year in China learning to speak the language and meeting other high-achieving students from every continent. Once when I tried to email Susannah, she wasn't home. She had gone to Spain for a couple of weeks with a classmate. When I caught up with her she acted like she had merely gone down to the corner 7-11 for a Coke.
Susannah and another friend were appointed to arrange the class graduation party. They considered several high-priced Beijing hotels. Then her friend suggested they throw the bash at his dad's place. It turned out that Dad was the ambassador from an African nation and Dad's place was his country's posh embassy in Beijing. My graduation party back in Iowa was in the high school gym. Our mothers cooked the food and we made the junior class serve it. We thought that was pretty high toned in 1945.
At this writing, our eldest granddaughter and her husband are back in town after paying their respects to Italy and Ireland. Our eldest grandson speaks casually of sunbathing on islands in the Indian Ocean where his submarine put in. Our next-eldest grandson, a Coast Guardsman, recently spoke of chasing drug runners off the Colombian coast.
You'll be pleased to know that Mom and I are getting into the globe trotting spirit ourselves. We're about to leave for a week at Inyokern.
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