Traveler

Lorna's Travels
japan-and-south-korea-2010
Alberta, Canada June 2013

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, I had no particular attraction to travel until my paternal grandmother took me at age 11 by bus to Vancouver and California, including Disneyland. That experience instilled in me a love of travel as a time of adventures, of the new and unexpected. After my first year of university, I spent half the summer working and the other half on a summer archeology course in Rome, followed by travel with a classmate through Italy and France. The next year, I traveled across Canada by bus, train and hitchhiking, even getting to go with my aunt and uncle on their salmon fishing boat from Prince Rupert to Vancouver along the west coast of Canada. After college I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and traveled with 3 college friends in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Back in London my friends flew back to North America, while I traveled on the TransSiberian railway from Dover to the Hook of Holland, and then to Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and across the Soviet Union, stopping in Irkutsk in Siberia. Crossing the Sea of Japan from Vladivostok to Osaka, I spent eight months studying in Japan, then traveled back to North America by way of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Hawaii. Later travels took me back to Europe, to India (where I worked with a medical missionary treating lepers in Kashmir) and Asia (where I studied batik, and taught kindergarten in Hong Kong and in an international school in Beijing). Most of these travels were by myself but later, with my husband, I traveled to Australia and New Zealand, the Philippines, and Fiji. For me, travel is an intense kind of living, each day filled with more new experiences, so that a week in Korea, for instance, remains memorably fuller and longer than almost any week at home. Travel's inevitable in-your-face difficulties are tangible challenges that stimulate me, in contrast to the vaguer challenges at home of charting my course through life. The inevitable waiting and long flights involved in making one's own travel arrangements (rather than going on a tour) can be frustrating to me but I notice that, with a long delay or wait, I sink into a more patient, accepting mode than at home. Travel's appeal for me has been both escape from ordinary life as well as the search to find myself and discover the world.