As a child, I marveled at my parents’ STORIES of their travels to Europe. We would get to stay for 2-3 weeks at a time with our Grandparents, so it was always a win-win when they went journeying across the pond. To keep connected to them back then, we had ridiculously expensive and static-y sounding long distance phone calls, made even more problematic by my Grandparents’ rural “party line”. The interested neighbours loved “not so secretly” listening in on how my Dad sold his Levis jeans right off his bottom for $300 to a random street person in Moscow during the 1980 Summer Olympics, which were boycotted, but my parents had planned and paid for years in advance, so they went anyway (and to this day, my Mum says seeing the Kremlin was a highlight of her life, and my Dad still proudly adorns his man cave with a team flag from Ireland, gifted to him by the Irish athletes who had signed it). OR, how Dad went the “right way” but Uncle Dan went the “wrong way” on an Alpine mountain when they were skiing with their brother, my Uncle Mark (who was living in Germany as a pro hockey player), and he ended up in a different “country”! The STORIES, that have been told over and over and over, always a little bit different each time, held me still in time. I’d steal their photo albums onto myself and hide away in the basement on the orange corduroy sectional, and flip these pages, and those of my Dad’s National Geographics, over and over and over. I was fascinated by the diversity of cultures and traditions and landscapes and…people. I would stare at their faces. Their stories were written all over them. I wanted to EXPERIENCE these kinds of stories for myself. Not just vicariously. It felt as important as breathing.

My meanderings, beginning at about age 12, have taken me first through all the regions of my own beautiful country; outward to the more typical Spring Break style hotspots for university students;  a marriage, the birth of my son; an un-marriage; authorship; an entire teaching career; several Caribbean and Skiing “March Break” vacays with my son; European summer vacations with my friends; a pandemic; the passing of dear friends; a slightly early retirement; and ever since…an amped up schedule of living life gloriously. Of… BREATHING. 

Not being tech savvy, I slowly increased my social media presence over time (remember, internet was not even a thing when I was in high school),  getting a wee bit comfortable with “friends only” seeing my posts, enough so to share my travel adventures through photos and narratives (from that point forward).  As a pleasant, unintended result of my simply living true to myself, blending my passions for story telling and traveling by documenting through pictures and narratives, people started reaching out to me, asking me to share my self-designed itineraries. I recalled how influential my parents’ travel tales had been in my life and in who I have come to be. I had my lightbulb moment. 

Go Sassie Go.