In 1992, while still a teenager, I grabbed a backpack and headed to Asia. I spent months exploring remote corners of India and Nepal. I am guilty—I admit—of wearing the memory of this trip as a badge of superiority. Occasionally, when I speak with a millennial about to embark on a modern version of the same voyage, I am taken aback. Because of the Internet,
my younger counterparts are able to book rooms on-line and use Google Earth to explore their destinations right down to individual park benches and shady spots at the beach. “The good ol’ days,” I am tempted to say to them,
“when traveling was an adventure!” Of course, in these moments of weakness I am reminded of the aged hippies I met in the Himalayas in the early-nineties. They shook their heads sadly at me and said, “you should have been here in the sixties;
now, that was real travel!” I am certain that my great grandmother could have scolded them on their fancy air travel; advocating for the good ol’ days when ship travel ruled. It is a familiar trope: Back and back we can go. Each generation longing for the times of old when, certainly, things were better.
