Before I met my wife, not quite 17 years ago, I’d taken my share of great trips, but I hadn’t yet come to see travel as an avocation. She, by contrast, had just come back from a week tooling around Rio by herself. From the moment we were a couple, our relationship was bound up in talk of where we would go next. She encouraged me—and she empowered me—to start thinking that dream trips didn’t have to stay dreams.
Our first vacation was to Amelia Island, and I still vividly remember the fragrant night air on the drive back from a day trip to Savannah, cracking up over the indolent alligators, swinging on the porch of our B&B as we learned about each other. A few weeks later we went to the Yucatán, my first time there, and though I didn’t realize it then, we were laying the foundation for a life together with our shared experiences: me, shopping for bandages and ointment after she took a nasty fall while biking to a cenote near Valladolid; her, teaching me to snorkel in Playa del Carmen; us, wandering the grounds of a deserted Uxmal and catching a ride back to town from Chichén Itzá with a friendly local family.
So many extraordinary adventures followed: Argentina, Peru, Greece, Hungary, South Korea. And so did two children, who have already visited more countries than I had by the time I finished high school. One of the ways we want to show them we love them is by showing them the world and teaching them that travel is their birthright. The pandemic has put a bit of a kink in that lately (“Papa,” they keep asking, “when are we going to fly on a plane again?”), but even by car we’ve done plenty of marvelous exploring, from Maine to the Finger Lakes to D.C. They’ve also gotten to sleep in innumerable fine hotel rooms I could only have fantasized about as a child. (The Langham, Boston was their undisputed champion of 2021.)
What I dream about now are the trips we have yet to take with them—not just this year but as they get older. Their first time in Paris is one I’m looking forward to, and so is their first safari. Also their first visits to Yellowstone and all the national parks. One of the central bonds of our marriage is a shared agreement that together we can—and will—make such dreams come true.
This issue delves into the topic of love through the lens of travel, with meditations on laughter, loyalty, and loss by the likes of Ada Limón, Colm Tóibín, and Elif Shafak. In a sense, of course, every issue is about love and travel. Travel builds bonds with those you hold dearest and helps you empathize with those you don’t know at all. It is, to appropriate a popular song from the 1960s, what the world needs now: love sweet love, and lots and lots of travel.
This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
