Not Quite a Kodak Moment

With my long anticipated Upper East Side fantasy trip slated to begin tomorrow morning, travel is on my mind.

Thinking back over the many trips I’ve taken, most for business but lots for pleasure, moments and memories from my mental photo album pop into my head.

I can recall returning to a Royal Air Force Base in the UK from Heathrow after having spent that first Christmas (was it Christmas 1981?) back in Boston. There was snow on the ground, the holiday spirit was still tangible and a stranger on the train to Ipswich offered to drive me from the station back to the base so I wouldn’t have to take a taxi. We stopped at a pub on the way and were asked to join a group of footballers who were still singing Christmas songs. Frank Sykes (so Dickensian!) dropped me off at the front gate that night while the snow fell and I felt like I belonged in England.

It’s midnight after a Christmas party an eight hour drive north of Adelaide. I’m outside with a group of slightly intoxicated Australians and a handful of drunken Americans. We’re trying to locate the Southern Cross and we finally do. I see that constellation, a view so different from my Big Dipper at home on the other side of the earth and I feel a part of the universe.

I’m standing alone on a bridge in Amsterdam, in the quiet of the early morning, looking in the distance at bridges and more bridges, houseboats sitting permanently on both sides of the canal, narrow, tall buildings with their impossibly narrow, steep stairways and I’m thinking that if I were to fall into the canal and disappear, no one would ever know what happened to me.

At the National Gallery in Washington, DC, I’m standing in front of the only painting by Leonardo DaVinci in the entire country. There are only fifteen known DaVinci paintings in the world. It’s so physically small, yet so large. I wander through the Dutch Masters; the French Impressionists then find my way downstairs to a room full of Degas sculptures. I can stop at each piece for as long as I want to and all of them belong to me.

I’m wandering the streets of a small town in eastern Turkey. It’s Kurdistan and nothing like the western city of Istanbul. It’s the first time we’re allowed off of the base where we’ve been restricted for three weeks to support some Air Force Reserve exercises. We are a freak show here in this tiny corner of the world where few westerners ever go. I’m a woman (with skin covered to the ankles and wrists despite the heat), one of us is Hawaiian, one is blonde, and one is a giant of a man with a shaved head. Little Turkish kids are literally bumping into adults on the streets while they stare at the spectacle that we are. We don’t belong here.

I have hundreds of these moments. It’s funny, but most of the things I recall from my travels were never Kodak moments. They were times that burned themselves into my mind for reasons I can’t quite explain or understand.

Do you have these travel memories? Are there moments that stayed with you from trips either alone or with a group? Were there people you saw or met briefly that you will never forget? Have you experienced feelings that overwhelmed you unexpectedly in a place that you found intensely beautiful, lonely or frightening? Do you have, as I do, moments you’ve never tried to explain to anyone else because they were so powerful you wanted to keep them all to yourself to preserve the magic?