CHILDREN AND ADVENTURE Instill the wonder of the world in kids

By Dennis Lopez

I’m supposed to be doing my taxes but for some reason my mind keeps wandering back to our recent trip to Europe. It was a wonderful family vacation with my daughter and her husband, my dear wife and…our 2-year-old granddaughter.

Frankly, the thought of flying for hours with a toddler seemed daunting. To steel myself, I consulted, what else, but the dreaded internet. There I was coached, counseled and cajoled by a cadre of folks who collectively scared the gillhoolies out of me about flying with my granddaughter. But then again they don’t know “Binks.”

She proved to be an amazing and adaptive traveler who flew quietly and waited patiently as we flew to, and returned from, Amsterdam and Italy. Part of her successfully dealing with the rigors of travel was the excellent job my daughter and son-in-law did to prepare her for the noise, hustle and bustle and confusion of travel well in advance of our trip.

Binks was a trouper and proved to be a great traveling companion because her little legs carried her at a pace that proved to be about equal to my slow and grandfatherly plodding. We had a fantastic time, but then why not? Her mother was the child who taught me about traveling with kids and the value of family travel. But it was a lesson that didn’t come easily to me.

For years, as a public relations manager for the Chrysler Corporation, I flew often. Hotels, restaurants and airplanes were a part of my work life.

Travel outside of business seemed like an extension of the stresses of my professional life and the thought of traveling with my kids only compounded those feelings.

The author’s granddaughter, “Binks,” age 2, meets some Italian children while traveling in Italy. It was an instant friendship, her grandfather said.

The impact of travel on children became evident to me when, long ago, my wife and I were deciding how to spend our winter holidays. We had spent the previous year’s vacation in Mexico in a bid to beat Idaho’s snows of December. That trip began with thoughts of a road trip to Southern California, with a brief incursion into the Baja Peninsula but slowly, if not reluctantly, evolved into our flying to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

What, if anything, we wondered, did our 6-year-old daughter remember first about her holiday gifts from two years back and, second, what did she recall about our Mexico trip? Her answers were a surprise to me. She could not recall any gifts from the previous year, but could tell us in detail about the “egg guy” who tossed some amazing made-to-order omelets at our hotel, or about “Maria,” who made fantastic guacamole aboard the whale watching boat we were on. She was like a diminutive Rick Steves, giving us a verbal travelogue about our trip, proving that in choosing travel, we had made the right decision.

So why take the kids along? I think that travel has the ability to influence children to be more curious, more tolerant of others and better able to understand that there is a much larger and more diverse world out there.

Does our taking a 2-year-old child to see da Vinci’s “David” mean she will develop a love for art? What was her take-away from seeing the stunning Duomo Cathedral in Florence… something she still calls “her Duomo.” Will she have memories of the lovely Japanese lady who gave her bread to feed to the pigeons in one of the many nameless piazzas in Rome? Or of meeting an Italian 2-year-old girl and creating an instant friend? I have no idea, only hope. Hope that enough exposure to our world and to others will help her develop a broader and more acceptant look at her world and the things and fantastic people in it. Hope that she will develop a curiosity for her world. And hope that she will see the similarity in people, rather than the differences.