I Belong In France...

            I don’t remember what began my Parisian desire. Maybe it started in high school French class, when Ms. Smith read from Les Miserables, and we all cried at the end when Jean Valjean tells Cosette goodbye. Maybe it was before that, when I saw the Eiffel Tower in the background of movies whose titles I wouldn’t remember, but whose ambience would linger, blending with my blood, stirring it until the romanticized ideal became bound to my personality.

            Or maybe it was the stories we heard Aunt Debbie tell her sisters, of her romantic week on the banks of the Seine with her lover (this we would whisper, blushing behind our hands, because he was African American and that was both forbidden and alluring). She sat at my Mom’s kitchen table in her low-slung jeans while they drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and she told about the Church of St. Julian de Pauvre, where five centuries of foot traffic had worn a trench into the center aisle of the chapel. She talked of eating crepes and sipping coffee in open-air cafes while listening to the soft sounds of French jazz lilting over striped awnings of Paris streets.

            I took two years of French in high school. Everyone said, “Take Spanish. We share a border with Mexico. Spanish makes more sense in the long run.”

            Pas moi, said I. I belong in France.

            My senior year, Aunt Debbie gave me the gift she’d been saving since the day of my birth: $2,200 in savings bonds. When she asked what I wanted to do with it, I told her: Paris.

            That was the plan. She and I would take a trip the summer between high school and college. Before we even hit the planning stages, Aunt Debbie met Ken – soon to be Uncle Ken. I was not upset at the change of plans. We adore Uncle Ken and were ecstatic for Debbie. Plus, I was young. There was plenty of time for Paris. And, my mother rationalized, wouldn’t I rather go to France with a man, since Paris is the city of love?

I would later use Aunt Debbie’s savings bonds to fund my own honeymoon four years later. Not Paris, but Cozumel.

            After our nine-day honeymoon in Mexico, my husband and I settled in our lives as newlyweds. We moved to San Marcos where I transferred from Lamar University to Southwest Texas State. Because Steve had been nowhere within the US, we concentrated on traveling stateside, visiting all of the Southern states from Arizona to Florida. We went up the eastern seaboard to Washington D.C. We took a cruise to The Bahamas. We toured the Old West including the Grand Canyon, Tombstone, Arizona, and a sweeping arc through Colorado and Utah.

            With all that out of our system, we began to plan our biggest hop yet: Switzerland, Wales, and Paris. We booked our three-week holiday for September 1998.

            Days after receiving our reservation confirmation, I learned I was pregnant. My due date: July 31^st. We would be traveling three countries in three weeks, with a six-week-old child.

            Yeah, we cancelled those travel plans before applying for our passports.

            Still, I couldn’t be disappointed. We were going to have a baby. We had been kinda, sorta trying or rather not preventing pregnancy, and so, to quote Steve, all things happen for a reason.

            We moved into the Parent Phase of our life together. Parent Phase precludes all traveling for pleasure. Young parents, take heed: spend the first three years of your young child’s life at home or at the park or at the grandparents’ house, if you’re lucky enough to have them near, but DO NOT attempt to travel. You’ll wind up in a hotel room tethered to Cartoon Network, munching on stale muffins from the Continental breakfast bar because you’ll be too exhausted to do anything else.

            The birth of our daughter, Katrina, brought a whole new level of enjoyment to our lives. Simple things like dandelions and ice cream became better than romantic evenings in street side cafes. The sound of her laughter trumped my grandest imaginings of French jazz wafting over the Seine. Dreams of our daughter diminished our ideas of adventure and travel abroad. We planned dream homes and dream jobs instead.

            But those were not to be, either.

            In 2001, Steve had a nervous breakdown, which led to the dramatic upheaval of our lives. Katrina was two and a half when her Dad and I divorced. She and I moved in with my parents while I scrambled to make sense of our finances, our assets, our lives.

            At the time, my parents were renting one half of a duplex in a decent part of town, but I didn’t want to be a burden on them. I was determined to recover from the divorce on my own terms. Before I knew it, I was a single mom working two jobs to pay for a government subsidized apartment. Travel was the last thing on my mind.

            But we did recover. Our roommate, Matt, moved in. He not only helped with paying rent, but leavened the heavy post-divorce atmosphere with constant encouragement and friendship.

            Soon, that old travel itch returned. I began considering small trips with Katrina. My parents had been the King and Queen of the summer road trip. Some of my most cherished memories involve seeing the countryside kaleidoscoping by the backseat window of a used Ford Grenada in which my brother and I experienced formative “she’s breathing my air” moments on IH-10 between Cocoa Beach, Florida, and San Diego, California.

I knew Katrina wouldn’t have a sibling, so I couldn’t give her those love-hate moments. But the desire to see the world with her had taken root. In March 2004, thanks to our cousins Francis and Elmer who live in Denver, Katrina and I took the Spring Break trip that would start it all.

That trip taught us two very important things. One, Katrina and I could travel to a place alone on very little money, managing transportation, airport security, and overnight stays in unfamiliar places all on our own. Two, Katrina is a born traveler who enjoys it as much as I do.

After returning home from Colorado, we launched headlong into planning mode. At the time, I still worked part-time in advertising at the San Marcos Daily Record, part-time as office manager at Air Conditioning Today, and as an after-school mentor for Americorps. The upside to these odd jobs was that we could take time off during the summer whenever we desired. The downside, well, we lived on incredibly limited means.

Still, that didn’t keep us from dreaming big. We dragged out Atlases and spent whole Sunday afternoons at Half Price Books poring over older-edition travel guides in an effort to decide where we would travel next. We knew we wanted something big, something outside the United States. The possibilities seemed limitless.

During this process, the rational part of my mind kept whispering, “Don’t you know this is insane? You’re a single mom with a six-year-old. You’re on a limited income, you’ve gone through bankruptcy, and your ex-husband is in and out of hospitals. How can you even think of taking your child out of the country when your life is in such disarray?”

Actually, Mom vocalized these exact concerns, and in not so much the whisper as the logic center of my brain.

I didn’t listen to her or to the whispers of my mind. In October of 2004, Katrina and I settled upon Scotland as our next trip. Matt helped make up our minds. It was in the Top Five on his list of places to go. He decided to go along with us, which soothed my mother’s apprehension; after all, traveling with a strapping American man equaled extra safety for her girls. His presence set her mind at ease.

            As autumn darkened our days that year, we spent many nights browsing travel websites in search of affordable places to stay. We found a glass jar and affixed a label to it that read SCOTLAND FUND in big black letters. All our spare change went into that jar, as well as any money we saved with coupons at the grocery store.

Matt, Katrina, and I created a budget which enabled us to save $200 each month. It meant we had to sacrifice things like movies and fast food from our expenses. Every time we went to Wal-Mart, Katrina would long for the latest bug-eyed plastic toy, and I would say, “Scotland Fund.” More often than not, she put the toy back.

At Christmas time, when people asked what I wanted, I said, “Money for Scotland.” Most of my family couldn’t believe that we would ever make that trip. But by January of 2005, with the help of an Earned Income Credit on my taxes and the money we had saved and received as gifts, we were able to pay for seven days at the Holiday Inn Express in Glasgow, Scotland, and roundtrip airfare for three.

After paying for the trip in full, we had from January to July to save up spending money. We also got our passports that winter, another first in a long list of firsts.

We took our trip to Scotland in the summer of 2005: Matt, Katrina, and me. It was truly the trip of a lifetime, and if we had only been able to manage just one vacation, I think we might have been content with our memories of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Stirling.

But that trip was only the beginning.

Without Scotland, the travel fever would not have ignited in us, inspiring us to deck one wall in our house with a huge map of the world, which we filled with pins to mark our desired destinations. Because of Scotland, we knew that no place on that map was beyond us. Not even Paris.

After all, I belong in France…