Wanderlust

I came to the realization today that I think I'm grieving a bit. A year ago this coming Sunday, my husband Mike and I left on a two-week trip to Europe. We spent a week in England and a week in France. We had a great time, met some great people, took lots of photos and brought home some wonderful memories. (One photo posted here shows us and Big Ben in London. The other photo is of us at Mont Saint Michel, an abbey on a tiny island off the coast of northern France.) I want to go overseas again. And I guess I'm a little sad.

I've gotten this way around the one-year anniversary of other overseas trips I've taken. At age 17 and right out of high school, I spent a month in France with a French family, my first journey overseas. Other teenagers save up their money to buy clothes and cars. I saved the money I made working at a child-care center to go to France. I had taken six years of French at the time and immersed myself in the language and the culture. The night before I returned home, I had a conversation with an American woman in Paris and realized it had been a whole month since I'd spoken more than a few words in English. (My "French father,"a school teacher by vocation, was a stickler for my speaking French all the time and would critique me every time I opened my mouth. It was annoying at the time, but I learned a lot.) Those few weeks away taught me that I could not only survive in another land and another culture, but I could actually thrive and enjoy it.

Six years ago I spent three months in India. It was such a significant experience in my life and changed me so deeply, I saw everything for the year or so after I returned through "India glasses." I marked all the month anniversaries of returning from India and could hardly believe it when one year, two years, then three and four years passed since the experience. Certain things still bring me back there, like the taste of curry and the smell of incense. On the hottest of our summer days when it gets above 100 degrees, I remind myself it could be worse. On our last day in India, we drove about six hours in a non-air-conditioned car to the Taj Mahal. The temperature reached 120 degrees that day. I drank three full liters of water and never went to the bathroom -- I sweated it all out.

About a year after I returned from India, I went to Vietnam on a humanitarian mission trip to bring medical care to orphanages and rural communites. That experience was only two weeks long, but I still taste, smell or hear certain things that remind me of my time there. I remember the laughter and faces of the orphan children who stole my heart. For one afternoon in Ho Chi Minh City (we know it as Saigon), I got to hold babies with HIV and AIDS in my arms. Few of them ever get any affection. Most of them probably ended up dying. I get tears in my eyes remembering their faces.

One particular song -- Michael Card's "I Will Bring You Home" -- I played over and over again on my portable CD player after I and the group I was with witnessed a terrible tragedy on a street outside Hanoi. A dump truck caught a man's bicycle wheel and flew him into the air, smashing him to pieces. It was such a violent sight, many of us were emotionally shaken. We drove back by the accident site a few hours later, after the sun had set, and many people had gathered in a candlelight vigil for the man. I listen to that Michael Card song today, and it brings me back to that moment in Vietnam.

Last year in England and France, Mike and I walked about 10 miles a day and came back about 10 pounds lighter. We became masters of packing -- we wore backbacks and refused to wheel anything around. Our primary modes of transporation were subways and trains. I brushed up on my French (Mike did, too -- he took some high school French) and felt in many ways like I'd come home. All the memories of my first trip to France when I was 17 came flooding back. In England we were awestruck by St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the most beautiful church I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of churches in all my travels. We were amazed by Oxford, the tradition and high standards of which makes our university system seem like elementary school. We fell in love with Normandy and its people as we for the first time learned about the sacrifices of American, British and Canadian soldiers during the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Paris, the last stop on our journey, was kind of a tough place for us. People rave about its charm, but we preferred Normandy.

These are the memories I'm pondering this week. We've talked about going back to Normandy and going to Belgium, too. We've also talked about visiting some friends of Mike's in the Czech Republic. Who knows what we'll end up doing? All I have is the memories of these experiences -- and the joy of having been to such amazing places with people I'll never forget.