I’m 25 years old. For all intents and purposes I’m a grown ass man. The problem is that I look like I’m 16 and act like I’m 12, so for the sake of argument here we’re going to think of “adults” as more of a generational jump. People my parents age. Well, in this case, specifically my parents.
I spent the last week and change traveling with my entire extended family. 10 “adults” and 9 full-grown “kids” terrorizing Southern France, Italy and Barcelona. An absolutely incredible trip. One that most people would only dream of, but something I was fortunate enough to experience with 18 of the people I love the most in this world. I’m very lucky.
(This is me buttering up my parents, aunts and uncles before I make fun of them for the rest of this…)
What I noticed over the course of 9+ days of family bonding is that traveling is a drastically different experience between the two generations. You never really stop to think about it, but the way that people travel has changed A LOT.
For starters, heads were on a swivel this week and if someone was going to rob us they were going to have to rip the 23.50 Euros we had between us from our cold, lifeless bodies.
Relative 1: “I heard that Barcelona is the pickpocketing capital of the world.”
Relative 2: “Well, I read online that if you super glue your wallet and your passport across the small of your back you can reduce the risk of pickpocketing by up to 30%.”
Transportation also proved to be another sticking point. From planes, trains, boats, taxis, busses, we tried them all. Unfortunately, we just never really seemed to nail one…
Relative 1: “There is not a single cab in this incredibly large, vastly populated, European urban center. It’ll be faster if we just walk the 10 kilometers to the restaurant.”
Relative 2: “I have a cab on Cabify that will be here in 4…”
Relative 1: “— We march at sunset!!”
And photos. Let’s not get started on photos. We took thousands over the course of the week. Some goofy, some staged, some candid, all of them ripe for social sharing, but how would we all possibly view them???
(photo gets taken)
Relative 1: “Can you send that to me? How are we ever going to share all these photos?”
Relative 2: “We can just set up a shared Google Drive folder.”
Relative 1: “I’ll never see them that way. You’re mother never sends them to me. Once you develop the film you can just mail it to me and I’ll make copies at Kinko’s and then take photos of those on my iPhone. There’s a great picture of the top of my head that I think will get a lot of likes if I set it as my profile picture on Facebook.”
I get it, though. People are traveling more today than ever before because access to travel has become so much simpler. We have it easy. I was even gently reminded that our great-grandmother took a boat across the Atlantic to Ellis Island and managed to find her husband two states away without ever popping into a cafe to pick up the wifi. NOW THAT WAS TRAVELING!
We may not have agreed on how to do everything during our trip and what one person loved, someone else almost certainly hated. But now that it’s all said and done we can probably all agree that traveling together led us to some great food, a few too many drinks and plenty of new stories to share around the family dinner table.
