April, <BR>If you thought wooden shoes on hilly terrain were goofy, picture this: <BR>I'm 8, my sister's 6 - Halloween in New England. We are wearing Gram's present from her latest trip - you guessed it, she had just come back from HAWAII. There we are, grass skirts, Hawaiian cloth bras, plastic leis...under winter coats. My mother has pictures to prove it. <BR>Nope, not made it to India yet. Sis and I vowed we'd never do Third World countries (one foray into Mexico did it for her), but then we went to Morocco (not really Third World, but kissin' cousins) and decided we've gotten to the point that we're ready for Third World countries. Not just emotionally, but also practically. Egypt is now on our list of to-dos (a friend just returned and he said it is a MUST). So many places, so little time.

I guess I got hooked on travel as a child; we took a car trip every summer. In addition, my godfather was an engineer living overseas and always sent dolls in native costume to me from wherever he was living or traveling. Plus my mom's best friend lived in Saudi for 4 years when I was very small. When these 2 people came to visit, it was always very exciting and special--they seemed very exotic to me. Dad used to always ask me whether I remembered something from a trip we'd taken long ago, and I finally started saying, 'I think that was when I was 9 months old, sorry.' Maybe looking at the National Geographic had something to do with it, too. I remember Big Blue Marble.

I think I was out kissing boys at the time Big Blue Marble was on TV, but I DO remember Jonny Quest and all the adventures he had at these faraway places. <BR> <BR>My first trip to Europe was as an "adult" counselor on a college singing group from our area: 31 18-19 year olds, and 6 adults. HA! Who had more fun?? We flew KLM, landed Netherlands, sang at a Dutch church service, bused through Belgium, to Paris, sang in Notre Dame, bused to St. Etienne, sang there, bused to Nice, sang in a gazebo, bused to Geneva, sang in a nursing home, bused to somewhere else, sang again, flew home. <BR> <BR>I decided I would never again travel with teenagers, and I would not set foot on a bus. But I would go back. <BR> <BR>

Great Question... <BR> <BR>I've always liked to travel. However, my early travel in the 1980's must not have passed through any "travel bug infected" areas because although it was fun, I wasn't dying to go back the second I got home. <BR> <BR>It wasn't until just last year that I actually got hooked on my first trip to Europe. <BR> <BR>My earlier travel was done before I started my own business in 1991. After that, I didn't have much time or money. Eight years later, we've done alright and are able to take time off when we want. Last fall we finally took a trip Paris, London, and Brussels. My husband had been a couple of times before but I never had. <BR> <BR>When we got back, we were already wanting to leave again. Then at Thanksgiving, a deal came up for Hong Kong and we jumped on it. My husband had always wanted to go to Asia. <BR> <BR>Now, the travel bug has bitten us but good! In the last 12 months we've been to Europe twice and Asia twice! No, we're not rich. We just can't help but take advantage of those great deals when they come along and we both drive 10 year cars and live in a small townhouse. <BR> <BR>Our next trip is Bangkok at Thanksgiving and then (hopefully), Prague and Budapest in the Spring. <BR> <BR>I'll drive a 10 year-old car, live in a very, very small place, eat at "good deal" restaurants, and shop at clothing outlets (or, better yet, in Hong Kong!) for the rest of my life if it means I get to travel. <BR> <BR>My family thinks I've hit the Lotto but I just tell them it's possible if it's a PRIORITY!!! <BR> <BR>:-) <BR> <BR>

Vanessa, I guess I got hooked on traveling when I was still in utero. My father was with Pan Am in its post-war glory years and, from our home in Miami, he and my mother would think nothing of spending a long weekend in Havana, Rio, or Buenos Aires. As a result, I regularly heard the staccato rhythms of Latin America from before I was born until I was four. <BR> <BR>But fate intervened and, from then until the summer I turned 20, my horizon was limited to what I could see from the nearest beach. I speak from experience when I say that, for someone with the innate urge to travel, there is no worse destiny than to be stranded at the end of a peninsula, with no functioning direction but "north." In the summer of 1969, the month of Woodstock and of Neil Armstrong's "one small step for a man," I hitchhiked to New York and flew Icelandic Airways ("the hippie express") to Europe. That trip awakened me to the world in a way I could only have imagined. <BR> <BR>Thirty years later, I have never stopped traveling. I travel for the pleasure of seeing new places and of re-experiencing familiar ones. Moreover, the list of places I want to see continues to grow. And while some sites may not live up to expectation, the memories of each place help fill in the mosaic that makes me the person that I am. <BR>

Kittie & Pam -- For some reason it makes me incredibly happy to know that someone besides me remembers Big Blue Marble. I know it was just a silly little show, but on the other hand, it opened up the whole world by showing me how diverse and wonderful all these different places were and making me want to go to them.

How could I have forgotten about the Big Blue Marble!? My children watched it faithfully, and so, of course, did I. During their growing-up years, we often had a map taped to the kitchen wall with out next trip (domestic) drawn out in red crayon. The travel bug's bite must have meant permanent infection because right now our son is in Finland and our daughter and her husband are planning their millenium New Years trip to London. And I think I'll just go put that map back on the kitchen wall! <BR>

Nothing very distinct, but chalk up another recollection of the Big Blue Marble. Maybe my kids watched it...? I got hooked on travel when I got to NYC for the very first time (Oh, how I'd longed to be there) and it didn't disappoint - not one iota! It helped that it was the October that Khrushchev and Castro were in town for the opening of the UN General Assembly (and Castro was staying in a hotel around the corner from us, so we were treated to nightly demonstrations - friendly - of hundreds of cheering Cubanos in the street below us.) Fast forward several decades to my first (equally long-awaited) trip o'seas, to the British Isles. I planned, in-depth (tho somehow unimaginably, w/o Fodors and the net - this WAS 1984, after all!!) for that journey for months. I was so excited, I'd get palpitations standing on the el platform (Chicago) in the morning, reading my guidebooks. Magic struck twice: This trip, too, somehow lived up to almost impossibly high expectations and we loved every moment of the three weeks we spent in London, Wales and Scotland. Just one memorable moment out of many: our first nite out of London, in a tiny town (Marlborough), in a little B&B above the pub (where the pubkeeper presented me with a Russian bear Olympics pin)...it was a prosaic room, but with a deep windowseat, overlooking the church steeple across the street. When the chimes struck, and later, when the moon rose...ah, magic! I'd made it - I was in England, and it was heaven!

I was conceived during the summer of my parent's trip to the Grand Canyon, so maybe it's no surprise that I fell in love with travel when I was seven and we went on a trip from Detroit to Sault Sainte Marie. Every since then, my passion has been planning my next trip! I can remember being in a businees meeting dreaming of hiking the Grand Canyon; if my boss had asked "What's your opinion, Paul?" I would have replied "I should hike down the South Kaibab and hike up the Bright Angel."

I had the bridge watch at sunrise. Our ship was off the North African coast, making its way very slowly toward Oran and its port city, Mers-el-Kebir. The entire eastern horizon turned salmon, with flecks of blue and gray. A chapel stood on a dark peak, outlined against the sky, looking like a black finger pointed upward. A fresh breeze came from the shore, carrying a smell of oranges and smoke. I gazed and gazed, watching the shore come alive with houses and road traffic. Then the sound of music came across the water, from the direction of a pier just ahead. There on the breakwater stood a band of French Foreign Legionaires, wearing their white kepi caps, the sun catching a gleam every so often off their brass instruments. I knew then that I had arrived at a mysterious place, one that would stay engraved on my senses all these 50 years. So long ago, so fresh in my mind.

Dear Fodorites: It's been great fun reading this thread! <BR> <BR>I too got hooked on travel pre-natally. I was born in Finland when my Finnish dad and Puerto Rican mom moved there after completing their doctoral studies at the U. of Chicago (Yes!) They had met at a foreign students' function and loved to tango! There is a photo of me in front of the Colosseum at 2 1/2, and and one of my earliest memories is of the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower. At four, my parents joined the U.N., and my childhood was spent in South America during a far more idyllic time. I have early memories of Macchu Picchu and open markets rich with textiles and basketry. As a counterpoint, childhood summers were spent in Finland visiting family and taking trains and ferrys to other European destinations. <BR> <BR>My own independent travel also began the summer of '69 (it really was a great year), with a trip to study French at Alliance Française in Paris, followed in 1971 by six months in Italy and Spain. <BR> <BR>I've since made my home in Hawai`i, and relish its natural beauty which feeds the spirit. We do try to get to Europe every five years or so, traveling domestically in-between. We have to plan for those longer trips, and have become home exchangers, which is a fun and meaningful way to travel. Most recently, we traded homes with a family in the French Alps. They loved it here, and by now my own kids too, have gotten to see the magnificent view from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Each trip we take makes them broader as people and more appreciative of what's special and unique to each locale. <BR> <BR>I share your joy in travel and in the appreciation of the richness and beauty of so many cultures. May we all get to continue to travel far and wide. Aloha! <BR> <BR>

Reading your descriptions is making me cry. Encore, encore...

and you?

When I was 10 my Grandma took me on a train/tour from Cleveland to New York City. We stayed in a big hotel. We saw the UN and took a Circle Line Cruise around the island, and visited Chinatown. Later that year my father brought a business client home for dinner. He was a charming Frenchman from Paris, who had two daughters just like my sister and me. He played the piano for us, and upon return sent us a record of French nursery rhymes. He was tall and handsome and had that beautiful accent.

My Grandfather died when I was 19 and left my sister and me $1000 each with the stipulation that we had to spend it on travel to another country. He loved to travel and had done a lot as a young man, but my Grandmother was a stay-at-home type and so were all her kids (and thus my own Mum). He tried to get them to love the rest of the world, but <BR>"there's none so blind as them that WILL not see". Anyway, he was determined that this travel-wallflower gene didn't get passed on to a third generation and to get the money we had to go. (I remember still, 30 years later, how mad my grandmother was-we should have been saving that money for our wedding trousseaus in her opinion!) Well, we went: England, France, Germany for 2 months. And I was hooked. But, curiously my sister was untouched by the experience and has not been out of the country since. In my will there is a clause that my Grandkids (as yet unborn)get $5000 each to spend on travel out of the country. Lets hope I have to increase that to $10000 before its an issue...or better yet take them myself as we have done with our own daughter.

I spent most of my childhood reading, and very early on, I became fascinated with Grimm's Fairy Tales....you know, where the king in a castle in a faraway land sets up all these trials that men have to go through before one of them can marry his daughter? That's how I got hooked with WANTING to travel. <BR> <BR>Then, in the higher grades of school, I became fascinated with Queen Elizabeth (the first one) and with Anne Boleyn (even named my first daughter Ann Elizabeth)and I knew I would someday go to England and see where they had lived. <BR> <BR>That first trip to England was all it took. Hooked...big time.

I suppose I got hooked on travel before I knew it - my parents took me to Ireland when I was just a year old. This was the late 60's and Aer Lingus gave my parents a cardboard box for me to sleep in on the plane - yes, I was literally packed up and became an under-seat carry-on! <BR>

I got hooked on travel at a very young age. I was very fortunate to have a father that worked for an airline, Northwest Airlines. From the time I was young, our family would fly somewhere about once a year, using the very inexpensive passes my father could get. With the exception of the Bahamas, all of the trips were to other U.S. locations; my first trip to Europe was a present to myself after graduating from college.

Goodness, I am not sure. I also remember watching Big Blue Marble and getting pen pals from there. However, one of my clearest memories was a social studies project where we were given a budget and had to plan a trip. I planned a trip to Peru and Easter Island. I think that is what truly hooked me on travel. However, my first trip to Europe wasn't until after high school since my parents weren't much into travelling out of their time zone.

I don't know why I got hooked on travel. From a very early age, I loved to look at maps - one of my favorite things was to look at the globe, read history books (English and French history were my favorites). Neither my brother or sister seemed to have the yen to travel that I did. By the time I was in high school, I had purchased a two-volume set of world travel and read them from cover to cover, imagining all the places I wanted to go. Then...somehow I never went. As soon as I graduated from college, I got married, started having children, etc. but never stopped thinking about traveling. My husband (now my ex-husband) was totally not interested in travel outside of the USA. We divorced when I was 41 - I started my own business, but one day I thought about all the things that I had dreamed of doing in my life and realized that the thing that I had most wanted to do was travel outside the USA and I hadn't done it. Within a few months I was in Africa, and later that year took one of my daughters to England and Wales. There have been many trips since then. <BR> <BR>The exciting thing for me is - I have a grandchild who is almost six. She already knows almost all the countries on the globe - when I came back from Scotland a few months ago, she was the one who looked at all the pictures and watched the video of the sights that I purchased there. I've promised to take her to Austria to see where Fraulein Marie (from the Sound of Music) lived, because she is fascinated with the scenery and buildings from the movie. I can't wait to take her! I know that through giving her that opportunity (when she is 9 or 10), it will change her life forever.