I was born on the road — or something close to it. As muttered elsewhere, my dad was a Navy man, and when your family has something to do with the military, one thing that’s guaranteed is that you’ll be on the move fairly often. So for me ‘travel’ as a concept is part normality, part nostalgia, part ‘yet another trip’ — it’s something that’s always been there for me and I think always will be.
The earliest move I made was when I was something like six weeks old, going from Bremerton, near Seattle, down to Coronado in San Diego Bay, in what would become the closest thing to home I’d ever have when growing up. And from there to other places and back again, to Hawaii, to Mare Island in San Francisco Bay, to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. And during all these times, the various trips and visits to other people, to relatives, elsewhere in California, to Montana, to Canada, to South Carolina, to Washington DC. Might yet say more about some of those individual journeys, but their importance for me is the sense of collage in my brain, about places and locales and differing experiences and how we all got there and back again, or else took the one way trips. I got used to packing things up pretty early, and even now it seems weird to me when I don’t move every so often — it’s down to a five year cycle now, and I enjoy it in its own way, the chance to start over fresh.
Travel and motion and locomotion and more, it’s something which I got used to by default and now enjoy for its own sake. And I’ll yet say more about it.