Beyond Being Tourists

My husband and I have traveled together since the time we met in July 2007. We began as tourists, traveling for pleasure, visiting places out of curiosity.  We became more serious travelers when we bought an RV, rented out our condos, and cruised through forty-nine American states, nine Canadian provinces, and six Mexican states. It’s all chronicled in the book Carolina: Cruising to an American Dream. The RV gave us the wherewithal to become more than tourists. We became explorers, adventurers, and even pilgrims.

An Explorer is defined as a person who combs an area for discovery. When we became Elite Members of Thousand Trails (a nationwide network of campgrounds) and upgraded our RV to a 37.5-foot motorhome towing a dinghy, we stayed three to four weeks at a place. This gave us the chance to explore an area more completely. I would research the places nearby and schedule daily explorations of the areas within three hours of our base camp.

In Ontario, Canada, for example, we saw all four different faces of the province: a government hub in Ottawa, a bustling metropolitan center in Toronto, a famous tourist spot (Niagara), and the rural town where we were camped. In Europe, we got to go to three countries from our base in the small town of Oberstaufen in Germany. The trains allowed us to visit Switzerland (St. Gallen), Lichtenstein (Vaduz), and Innsbruck (Austria).

An Adventurer, on the other hand, is a person who has, or seeks, activities or places for excitement or an unusual experience, despite the risks they may entail. I must admit that Bill is more of an adventurer than I am. He used to scuba dive, ski, fly a plane, etc. I just play with my smartphone or laptop, an armchair sort of a girl.  I’ve tried playing tennis and pickleball, but they didn’t like me. Does riding the helicopter in Kauai or taking our RV to the Arctic Circle in the Yukon count?

When we stumbled upon the Worthington Glacier on the road to Valdez, Alaska, Bill went up to climb it while I stayed behind, scared I might hurt myself or be frozen. When we went with his high school friends for a reunion in Crested Butte, Colorado, he went wild river rafting with his friends while I stayed behind to write about the reunion instead. At Grandfather’s Mountain near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Bill negotiated the Mile-High Swinging Bridge while I took his photo.

A Pilgrim is another kind of traveler. This is a person who journeys, especially a long distance, to some sacred place as an act of devotion or even as an original settler. Once, being both Catholics, we diverted from our planned itinerary to Minnesota and turned west instead of north to visit the Grotto of the Redemption in the northeastern corner of Iowa. It was off the beaten path, but we wanted to see the complex of nine grottos made from forty-three different kinds of gems individually gathered and built entirely by the hands of three men.

A friend and I became accidental pilgrims in Eastern Europe. We were in Razlog, Bulgaria visiting a beautiful Eastern Orthodox Church in nearby Bansko when she suddenly had a yearning to find a Catholic Church. The nearest one was in Skopje, Macedonia, three and a half hours away, where Mother Teresa was born. We hired a taxi, prayed at the Chapel attached to her house, and visited the Church of the Black Madonna where she heard her calling at 18 in Letnice, Kosovo, an hour and a half away. The way home was through Nis, Serbia, birthplace of the first Christian Roman Emperor and Saint, Constantine the Great.

Indeed, we both had become explorers but I will not be the adventurer that Bill is. But we hope to be more of pilgrims. It is time for deepening our faith in this phase of our lives. Which of the three kinds of traveler do you want to be?