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Last week I popped open my email to find a perfect photo of a blue footed booby. He stands in sharp profile, the bird equivalent of looking right at the camera, his magnificent blue feet facing forward. A few days later I talked to my mom about the picture she sent - about the fearlessness of the animals on Galapagos, about the strictness of the guide, and about how apparently, when you roll down the windows while driving through the countryside in Ecuador, it smells like roses.
I am a combination of totally psyched and sick with envy over my mom's recent travels, though I do not begrudge her them, not one bit. Plus, we were invited to tag along - we had to decline for a number of reasons, the primary one being economics. Mom's method of travel requires a bit more padding than we're willing to pay for. That parental contingent is retired and blowing our inheritance on exotic locales. (Before you get up in my face about that tasteless remark, let me explain that it's a family joke that followed the death of my gramma, a woman who filled her Bronx apartment with things she never unwrapped and stayed home.It's another story entirely.)
In the context of this site, I think we tend to shoehorn traveling moms into those who are jetting about with their kids, rather than those who are jetting about without them because, hey, those kids are grown and let them make their own damn travel plans already. My mother in law does this often, catching flak from her family last year for ditching them to head for a spa week spanning the Christmas and New Year's holidays. And she's here now, having zoomed halfway across the planet from her native Austria to hang with us for a few weeks, bringing along her travel pal of many years - the two of them have had endless adventures from local bus trips to neighboring European capitals to more remote destinations. Right on for them. The last time I saw my stepmother's mom, a very healthy woman well into her 70s, she was talking of heading to New Zealand with Elderhostel, an educational travel organization that specializes in travel for those over 55 years old.
My mom isn't a blogger and while I did introduce her to the joys of Flickr so she could share her garden photos without clogging inboxes across the US, I'm still waiting for the photostream to appear. My friend K's mom has a blog that she updates now and then about her adventures from the varied RV parks where they pause in their nomadic lifestyle, but K's posts about his trips there tell me more about their lives on the road than his mom's. My usual search techniques turned up little by way of blogging by retired travelers - though there were plenty of how to articles. It makes me ponder the generational nature of blogging our travels (again, before you get up in my face, I know that retired travelbloggers exist, but they're not the dime a dozen that younger generational travelbloggers are). It's highly likely that those laptop free retirees know something I don't know about travel, that it's a good time to step away from the keyboard, take a look around, and be where you are.
But if your mom is a traveler, I'd sure like you to teach her to blog. We both know she has stories to tell.
Photo from Sensaos on Flickr. Not my mom's but still very nice.
Pam blogs about travel and other adventures at Nerd's Eye View.
