We Crave What We Never Had

I just got off the phone with my sister.

She recently returned from New York City where she spent a week with her youngest daughter, who had an audition for a part in a huge musical production. Her oldest daughter recently returned home from a monthlong program with her university, where she lived and studied in Florence. Her high-school-age son was about to leave for a trip to Barcelona.

Meanwhile, I’m in the mountains of North Carolina on a reporting trip for a travel story that I’ll soon publish. My wife and kids are with me. Before this, we spent much of this summer with in Minneapolis. The only time we’ve been apart was a week where I had to go to Italy for another reporting trip, to ride one of the world’s hardest bicycling events in the Dolomites. In a few days, we’ll drive home, where we’ll spend about 18 hours before heading to the airport and flying to New York City, where we’ll be for the final week of our summer.

I laughed at the lengths my sister and I have gone to travel as adults, recounting all the years I spent touring around America in a rock-and-roll van, where traveling is 90% of the job.

“People always crave what they didn’t get as kids,” she said.

When we were kids, my family wasn’t the traveling type.

We took plenty of day trips, no doubt, and long weekends; excursions to D.C. and Philly, upstate New York and New England. But we only got on a plane once as a family, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, to go to Disney World.

Granted, we grew up at the beach, which is special in its own right. To be raised where everyone goes to vacation negates some of the need to travel. So there’s something to be said about that. We also grew up 90 minutes south of New York City and spent plenty of time there. We also frequented my mother’s native Jersey City, just a quick subway ride under the river from Manhattan, and the town in Long Island where my father grew up, which is about five minutes from Queens. I remember watching Family Double Dare as a kid, perplexed that one family was so excited to win a trip to New York City, a place my mother took me all the time.

“Not everyone lives an hour from New York,” my father explained.

(Speaking of, as he is ever the supportive dad and I know he’ll be reading this, allow me to say: we had a great, amazing, fun-filled childhood, pop! Thanks for everything!)

Still, the world is big and, despite being semi-regulars to one of the world’s great cities, we saw almost none of it.

When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was explore places. When my mother took me to the little white library near the bay in our town (which was a staple ritual of our mother-son relationship), rather than books, I’d pull out Rand McNally map collections and trace my finger over the roads of whichever city I opened to—Rome and Tokyo, Buenos Aires and London—imagining what those cities looked, smelled, sounded, and felt like; who their people were and whether or not they looked anything like the people in my little clamming town on the Jersey Shore.

I’d ask my father to tell and retell me the stories of the years he lived in the Dominican Republic, studying medicine. I was jealous of my big sister, that she lived there for a few years while I never got the chance (ignoring the fact that she was a newborn and an infant when she lived there and hardly remembers it).

Shortly before I got my first New Jersey state driver’s license, I plotted a course to Los Angeles, suddenly realizing that the roads connected across America and I could simply get in a car and drive there. Of course, being sixteen and all, I knew I couldn’t afford it. But a boy had to dream.

As soon as I could, I started touring with bands, taking little regional weekend jaunts during college to play basement shows and dive bars around Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Jersey, and Virginia.

Not long after I graduated college, I moved to Rome, where I lived and taught English as a second language for a few months. It was an experience cut all too short by my my mother’s initial cancer diagnosis.

The first job I got after we got my mom on her feet was working as a guitar tech for a riff metal band from California on a six-week U.S. tour. It was the first time the roads from those Rand McNally maps became real and the first of many that I would drive around America in a rock-and-roll van. In the years since, I’ve crisscrossed the country dozens of times, working as a musician, a tour manager, a guitar tech, and a merch guy. My idea of a great time is spending endless hours in a van, spending every night in a different city.

As soon as I was able, I began to fill my cup with the thing I’ve always wanted. And I haven’t stopped yet.

And while my sister has never been in a tour van, she’s always planning the next adventure for her family, desperate to see as much of the world as possible.

It only makes sense that she and I are insatiable travelers. It makes sense that my road, circuitous as it may have been, has led me to become a travel writer, a professional explorer. And, in some weird way, the 43-year-old man who gets paid to travel and experience places I’d never thought I’d go is no different than the little boy running his finger over the roads of a map. Only now, the roads are real.