Is Seeing Enough?

A number of years ago my wife’s niece got married in Paris. It was in May so I was unable to go, but she and my daughter went. They arrived a week ahead of the wedding to have the opportunity to tour Paris, and tour they did. I got reports each night about the churches, museums or other places they had visited and how tired they were after walking all day. They tried to see it all.

A few years later my daughter had the opportunity to go back to Paris and stay with her cousin. She was more relaxed this time and visited the sights at her leisure. I’ll never forget her words to us. She said, “I feel like I am visiting Paris for the first time.” Taking a leisurely pace and not feeling the rush to get to the next church, monument or museum allowed her to experience Paris rather than just see the sights along the way.

Here is the tension we face. There are often things we feel we have to see when we visit certain places, and if we are doubtful that we will ever return, we rush around making sure we see everything. After all, we don’t want to miss an important site. Can you imagine coming home after visiting Paris and reporting that you didn’t go to the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre? What would people think about you? There’s also a desire to get your money’s worth from the trip in the time that you have there. But the question remains, is that really the best way to experience a place? What exactly will you remember?

In 2010 I went with the 8th graders from my school to visit Washington DC. We were there from Tuesday to Saturday. We were on a specific tour that took us to all the great places there are to see. We went nonstop from morning to night. The problem was the kids were getting really tired from the constant traveling about. They begin to lose interest in the things they were seeing. One girl said to me as we were walking to another memorial, “Mr. Lee, I don’t think I can see another statue of someone.” She had stopped caring about the places we were visiting and was just going through the motions. She probably didn’t even remember all the sites she had seen, but she could say she had been there.

There’s an old question about quality versus quantity, and I think that applies to travel as well. It’s not so much how many things you see that matter, but the experiences you have along the way. My first major trip overseas was nearly 50 years ago. What is it that I remember about that trip? Many of the details are lost to me, but certain feelings, emotions, and experiences stand out to me. I remember feeling anxious in the strange land of Egypt and carefully locking the door of the hotel room. I remember being excited to eat watermelon because I had been afraid to drink the water and was so thirsty. There was one young man in Taiwan who carried my suitcase for me , and for some reason that gesture stands out in my thinking. Yes, on that trip I saw the pyramids in Egypt and the Taj Mahal in India, but those are not the main things I think of when I remember that trip so long ago. It was the experiences I had that mattered the most.

My dream vacation is to go somewhere and rent a place for a month. In that month We would be able to travel around the area, but do it at our leisure. No rush. If we want to just rest a day, we would. If we want to spend two days somewhere, we could. Most importantly we would be able to interact with the people. Experiencing the life and culture of the area would be the priority, but we would get to see the sights as well. To me that would be meaningful travel.