Memories Are Made Of This

We have a little adage we share with our customers around our place that goes like this, “Lend us your dreams and we will repay you with memories.”  Undoubtedly, one reason I like the phrase so much is that, in a rare moment of clarity, I penned it.  We are all partial to our own progeny, are we not?

Anyway, it turns out that dreams are fungible.  Most people, if they lend you their dreams are quite happy to be repaid in unforgettable memories. In this regard, my heart beats as one with our clients.  When describing the travel business to the uninitiated I often say, “No doubt I will die as poor as a church mouse but I shall pass the autumn of my life, like Midas with his golden coins, running the fingers of my mind through a personal trove of indelible memories.”

In my more reflective moments, and you must forgive me as I am feeling a little pensive today, I marvel at the all the places I have visited and experiences I have garnered over the past couple of decades.  I am reminded of the words of the brilliant Benjamin Disraeli, the erstwhile British prime minister, “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”

There are any number of sound reasons to travel:

to realize our aspirations – “We wander for distraction but we travel for fulfillment.”   Hillaire Belloc

to broaden our perspective – “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”   Henry Miller

to cure our parochialism – “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”  Mark Twain

If these aren’t reason enough, my friend Kate over at Trip Logic has written a great post called 100 Reasons To Travel Inspired By Bloggers From Across The Globe not diminished in the least by the fact that one of this humble blogger’s posts somehow slipped into the list!

What I am suggesting here is that one of the very best rationales for travel is to make a lifetime of deposits into your memory bank so that you can live off the interest of fond recollections up to the very day the Great Conductor shouts “Last stop!”

One of these days . . . not today so don’t panic . . . I will perhaps tell you about the gypsy girl who literally threw herself under the tour bus I was guiding (OK, perhaps not under but certainly into) and the near riot that ensued.  Some day I will tell you about flying DFW to Miami to Rio de Janiero to Belo Horizonte, staying for only one night and flying the same route back home not once but twice within a ten-day window!  If you are truly blessed, I will tell you about running in the famous annual Sydney “City To Surf” race with literally ten minutes forethought and zero training or preparation.  That is, if I can do so without instinctively clutching my calves and whimpering like a small puppy.

Travel is not a get rich quick scheme but it is a get rich slow scheme, of sorts.  Do as I have done and you won’t have two nickles to rub together but you will have the widest irrepressible grin of any 90-year-old Walmart greeter in the entire chain.