We now return to introducing our board member through their own stories in their own words... recalling the most impactful or memorable travels of their lives.
Next up is Martin Vanderwerf. If anyone knows how education and careers tie together, it's him. He works at the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce revolves around researching such topics. Here, he shares how travel itself was an education for him.
-Yasmin
I was one of nine children growing up in small-town Wisconsin. We had no dreams of international travel, save for when an occasional road trip took us across the Canadian border.
But I was always fascinated by the idea of going to the Europe I had read about in books, and seen on TV and in the movies. I never had the chance to go, though, until I was 34. One of my older brothers, my younger sister, and a family friend decided it was now or never: we were going to see as much as we could since we couldn’t be sure we would ever have the chance again. We saved money, we bought plane tickets and Eurail passes, and we planned stops in London, Paris, Munich, Salzburg, Florence, and on through the rest of Italy.
We decided to do the fabled “backpacking through Europe tour” though we were at least a decade older than anyone else doing the same thing. This was 1995: before cell phones, before the Internet. Travel guides told us that travelers simply had to trust that housing arrangements could be finalized as they arrived in new cities. Coming from the anxiety-ridden United States, it was hard to take that leap of faith. What did we know? We had never been there before. It turned out that there was always an office near the train station in every city where visitors could inquire about hotels and rooms for rent. Often representatives from hotels or hostels would offer to take newcomers on tours of where they would be staying before they committed. The transparency and the community feeling was extraordinary. People trusted one another, and worked together to help perfect strangers. Yes, they stood to make money, but they were so casual about it, spending an hour or so just to show off what they were offering. It felt like we had joined a global village we previously didn’t even know existed.
The fact that we were carrying everything we had on our backs for three weeks necessitated compromises. We didn't have the money to eat in restaurants more than occasionally, and wanted to save our money for things like museum admission and adventures like renting Vespas to ride through Rome. So, when we could, we picked up a loaf of bread, some meat and cheeses, and had picnics. We also only brought enough clothes for five or six days, which meant we would have to do laundry at least three times during the trip. Laundromats were an inconvenient but necessary diversion. We had to find them, make sure we had enough coins in the local currency (francs in Paris, deutschmarks in Munich, etc.), and figure out in languages we could not read how much detergent to use.
And then we got to Venice. At the place we were staying, we asked in our pidgin Italian where we could wash our clothes, only to be told there are no laundromats in Venice. There are, however, laundresses who will wash clothes for you, charging by the kilo. We nodded in agreement to directions we did not really understand, and we set off, four Americans walking the alleys and plazas and crossing the ancient bridges of Venice with an armful of dirty jeans and t-shirts. Venice has no roads, only canals. Businesses appear suddenly out of the stone buildings: a cheese shop here, a pharmacy there, a hardware store. They all began to look the same.
Three lefts and then a right. Is that what they told us? Or was it two lefts, a right, and then another left? We couldn’t remember and we realized we were lost. It was a little embarrassing carrying soiled underwear and socks through the city, maybe dropping some along the way. We looked at one another, and slowly we all began to laugh. Two weeks before this day, we had never left North America, never left the familiarity of people and places we had known our whole lives. And here we were, in one of the most storied cities in the world, carrying our dirty laundry, hopelessly lost. We were worried, maybe even beginning to panic, but the absurdity of it was downright funny. I realized in that moment I had let go of all I knew before, and unquestioningly embraced the unknown, living by instinct instead of direction, living in THIS moment because I didn’t know what the next moment would bring. I was stirred–I knew I would never see the world and my life the same way again.
Somehow we retraced our steps back to the house where we were staying, and this time we set off in the opposite direction. Five minutes later, we found the laundress, just where we were told it would be. But we had found something more important along the way. When you are free of constraints and preconceptions, every path is worth taking, especially the ones without a fixed destination.
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