Hannah and I spent most of spring break at my mom’s house.
We were sitting around one day, talking. I think my mom was asking Hannah about the Grandpa Trip and Hannah surprised me by saying she was afraid of the Grandpa Trip and didn’t know if she wanted to go.
I really shouldn’t have been surprised. Here I am planning this big trip that seems like a big deal to me and I haven’t even thought of how it might seem to a not quite 17 year old who has hardly ever been away from home. And whose biggest city visited so far is Kansas City, MO.
She thinks she’ll be too homesick. It’s true she gets homesick after just a couple days (but she’s held up against it for a week of camp several times), and our trip was adding up to several weeks.
I let her know I didn’t expect her to do anything she didn’t want to, and that maybe we could cut things short and just see the places she’s really excited about. She said she didn’t know, she didn’t want to not go but she didn’t want to be there and be miserable.
Later, she told me she had thought it over and was really up for the whole thing, but I’m not so sure now. As selfish and travel hungry as I am, I don’t want Hannah’s first trip abroad to turn into a nightmare for her so she’ll never want to travel again. So I’ve been thinking about places we can leave out.
It’s not really hard to think of the first few places to cut. There are plenty of places I put on the list that Hannah really couldn’t care less about. The entire country of Wales for example. The Lake District and the home of Dorothy and William Wordsworth. That would bore her as much as it thrilled me. We can leave off New York, especially since I’ll be going next month. Hannah wasn’t really interested in anything except seeing ‘The Daily Show’ taping anyway.
After that there’s still things that we could leave out - Paris, Florence, even Venice. Or Hannah could leave from London to go back home and I could travel to Paris and Italy on my own. There are plenty of possibilities and plenty of time to adjust the plans and make up our minds. Hannah will get at least two more lovely trips before we go - this June to DC to see Joel, and Disneyworld right after Thanksgiving. Chances are we’ll go back to Mexico before the Grandpa Trip as well. And she’ll be older. It’s a year and half till we’d go and that’s a lot of time for a teenager.
So. Old plan, out. New plan, being formed. But no worries - it’s kind of like getting to plan a whole new trip. Planning a trip is the next best thing to taking a trip.
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