JetSetterJoe.com

I am sitting at home watching the Grand Prix of Monaco on TV and I can’t help feeling that everything looks very familiar. Even though I was there nearly two years ago and the place looks very different having been transformed for the race by the grandstands, billboards and all the rest of the race paraphernalia, I feel that I was there only yesterday. As I listen to the commentators on Speed TV reminisce about their own experiences over years of covering the race from Monaco, I can’t help but think that this “sense of place” is due to more than the simple fact that I was there.

I first visited Monaco over 15 years ago as a wide-eyed teenager on vacation with my family. I can remember many things about the trip vividly: facts, figures, histories. However, whenever I use to see the places I had visited on TV, they didn’t seem much more real to me than before. Having traveled a bit as an adult, the experience has been completely transformed. The Eiffel Tower, Times Square, the monuments in Washington DC, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, they all seem much more real to me now when I see them on TV or in pictures.

I can’t help but think that independent travel is partly responsible for my keen awareness of spaces I have visited. All of my travels as a child and teenager were family trips usually as part of organized bus tour or cruise. Most organized tours are designed to bring the group as close as possible to as many sights as possible in the shortest amount of time, collect the entire group safely as close to as possible to the sights and deposit everyone back at the hotel or ship at the end of the day. There is very little flexibility to roam on your own and discover places and things through the age old method of finding your own way.

If there is any flexibility, the individual is largely held captive to the collective will of the group. This is especially true for a kid on vacation with his or her parents. Not only does the kid have to comply with the whims of the group, which—by the way—are very unlikely to be in line with his or her own interests as the average age of most tour groups seems to be 90, but he or she has to stay mostly with the family unit if there is any free time.

In a sense, organized tour travel is travel by autopilot as one leaves most of the decisions to some else. Some may argue that traveling independently is too stressful as one has to do everything oneself. Indeed, in some places independent travel may be too difficult, dangerous or downright impossible. Despite this there is a payoff in taking on the added anxiety of traveling as independently as possible given the circumstances. Because one <u>must</u> pay attention to the surroundings, one is more likely to remember places more vividly. Besides, most times one’s anxiety is unfounded as the worse-case scenario in one’s head is almost always worse than any real difficulties one may encounter. (Believe me, I know.)

Another advantage of traveling in small group is that the dictatorship of the majority is somewhat minimized. During that first trip to Europe, there were many automotive sights that my father and I would have liked very much to visit. Instead, we had to put up with hours of browsing glass and leather shops where little old lady’s were picking souvenirs for their grandkids. I vividly remember one guy who, after much negotiation, got the green light not only from his wife but from the tour matron to spend a few hours in a beer hall in Munich. That was the first time I ever saw a grown man with a “kid on Christmas morning” look in his eyes. (I see it all the time now, usually in the mirror.) The guy took off before anyone had time to change their minds and we watched him through the panoramic windows of the plush bus as he disappear into the gigantic timber-framed beer haus thinking that was the last time we would ever see him again.

So is my “sense of place” the product of independent travel? Who knows? Ask in me in 15 years if you’ve never returned to Europe. Of course, I plan to return to Europe much sooner than that so we may never know. In that case, not know doesn’t sound too bad.