How Important is Travel to our Children? Very Important!!

As a child, my fondest memories are of travel with my family.  My family always believed that material things were far less valuable than lasting memories of experiences when we would travel together.  I am so thankful for their philosophy and desire to do the same with my family.

Just mentioning a few adventures which have led us to Maui, where I was certified at age 12 to scuba dive.  I still remember how my mother would tell me that she didn’t get to travel to Hawaii until she was almost 40, how fortunate I was to be able to travel there several times starting when I was in high school.  Our family was  also led to Saint Vincent in the Grenadines, where my dad (who was a dentist) and the family performed missionary dental work and we had the good fortune to scuba dive almost every day at the beach right outside of where we stayed.  Now the contrast of Maui and Saint Vincent were great to say the least.  I know how fortunate that I was to be able to travel do my certification dive in Maui instead of Blue Hole New Mexico, I was able to pet a moray eel on my first dive in the ocean! It was so exciting, and an opportunity that most don’t get at the early age of 12. 
My travel to Saint Vincent instilled a true picture of extreme poverty, and the absolute excess that we are blessed with in America.  I will never forget when my mother walked into a grocery store when we first got home, and she was overcome with emotion, and had to leave crying when faced with the abundance that we all to often take for granted.  It was several weeks before my mother could go to the grocery store again.  My brother and I, at ages 11 and 7 were shown a reality not seen by many in person, we had to travel in order to get this experience.  When you see children who are thrilled to have a bike wheel and a stick to push it with, it makes a child reconsider what is truly important in life.  We would travel through town with my brother and I in the back of the truck and all of the children in the town would be yelling out my brother’s name.  This experience changed us forever and we would travel there again several years later to continue the journey of life learning that taught us more than we could ever learn from books.
Travel took us to places outside of ourselves where we could experience things beyond our wildest dreams.  Because of this, I am so grateful for my family for allowing us the opportunity to learn through the experience of travel.

Grateful for all of my blessings,