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I recently completed a two week international trip as part of my executive MBA program at Georgia Tech. I’ve already written about the learning exchange that happens when students visit a company. This week I want to write about travel. Just travel. Partly it’s an opportunity to share a bunch of pictures and memorialize the experience, but it also serves as a moment to reflect on the value of travel for its own sake.
Back in the spring of 2005, I had the opportunity to travel to Europe for the first time as part of a study abroad program at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Our campus was a renovated Carthusian monastery in Gaming, Austria. We would spend three and a half days in class and then take off Thursday afternoons for long weekends taking the train across Europe. It opened my eyes to a different part of the world in ways that I couldn’t have imagined.
I would end up traveling back to Europe each year for several years. In 2006, I visited the seminary in Rome because the archdiocese was considering sending me there for my continued studies on the path toward the priesthood. In 2007—I had left the seminary and was no longer studying to be a priest—I traveled to Valencia, Spain for a work trip. I went back in 2008 to visit my friend Michael (pictured above) during his studies in seminary in Rome. My final trip was again to Rome in 2009 with my wife for our honeymoon and to see my friends Michael and Llane be ordained deacons at St. Peter’s Basilica.
Having traveled to Europe five years in a row, once we started having kids—Sophia was born in 2010—international travel stopped. I didn’t really notice that it had happened. But with a growing family, we didn’t really have the budget nor the time to travel except to visit family.
When we arrived at our hotel the Saturday morning after flying overnight, I wasn’t in the mood to travel. But my friend Mark nudged me to go with him to visit Fatima. We had talked about it before the trip, but I wasn’t sure I was up for it once we actually arrived completely jet lagged. Mark convinced me to get off the couch in the hotel lobby and begin our adventure.
Right off the bat, I was reminded of the uncertainty and excitement that comes with traveling in a foreign country. It had been so long since I had been in a place where I didn’t know the language or the customs and had to get uncomfortable in order to get around. We ended up at a train station planning to take the train to Fatima, but the attendant selling tickets told us we would be better off taking the bus, which was at a station across town. I was slightly discouraged as we stopped to get coffee.
We eventually found the bus station and ultimately the trip to Fatima was a success. It was a thrill to rediscover how to travel in a new city and country and go on an adventure.
My daughter—the one whose birth portended the cessation of my international travels—was mad at me that I missed Easter with the family, but being Catholic, it turns out you can find mass pretty much anywhere in the world. I was immediately reminded of the time traveling throughout Europe as an undergrad, where we would try to figure out where to go to mass on Sundays in languages we didn’t know.
One of the remarkable things about traveling in European cities is visiting areas of town that predate cars and are only visitable by walking. This exists in the oldest cities in the United States, but it’s not a very common everyday experience for most Americans.
One of the other things about travel is considering the experiences you can only have in one particular part of the world. In an increasingly global world, you can have the illusion that nothing is local. Seeing pictures of some place on social media (or even in this newsletter), you mistakenly think you’ve experienced what you’ve seen. But nothing replaces actually being there. It changes you.
Being in a walkable city also presents the opportunity to stop and grab a drink with a friend because, why not, there’s a bar with a pink elephant on its sign and we can literally sit in the window two stories above the street and have a beer.
Being able to travel with a large group means lots of opportunity to connect over meals and meet people who I didn’t know very well previously. I thought I knew my classmates pretty well, but when you travel together, there’s an incredible amount of time to enter into deep conversations and really connect.
Part of the fun of having a camera with you when you travel is being able to take pictures of anything you want, like a statue of Pope John Paul II in Cascais because you remembering being present at the Piazza in St. Peter’s for Pope John Paul II’s last public appearance in 2005 before he died.
Tours. I think if you had asked me before the trip what I might have thought of tours, I would have said they were boring or perhaps unnecessary. Man, was I wrong. You know the best part about a good tour guide? Storytelling. A good tour tells an immersive story that plants you in another time and place. It made me really think differently about how we give tours of businesses and products. Do our business tours do a good job telling a story?
Although I traveled to Madrid during my studies in 2005, I missed traveling to Toledo. I took the opportunity to correct that mistake this time around.
I’ve visited lots of churches, but the Toledo cathedral was remarkable.
There’s nothing quite like walking into the sacristy of an ancient church and suddenly being presented with an original painting that you know you’ve seen before. There’s nothing like seeing it in person.
Outside of Toledo, we were able to appreciate the beauty of the Spanish countryside when we visited a winery.
Similar to how we had experienced Fado music in Lisbon, I was delighted to experience Flamenco dancing in Spain. What I didn’t realize was that Flamenco is a type of improvisation with percussive patterns as complex as any drumline I’ve heard.
When I traveled to Madrid as an undergrad, I traveled to Avila on my own. My other travel companions that had joined me in Madrid didn’t want to spend the 26 euros to take the train. So I went by myself.
On this most recent trip, I wanted to recreate that experience somewhat and asked Mark if he wanted to join me. My only real goal was to travel there by train and eat a delicious meal for lunch.
If you go to Avila, make sure you visit Los Candiles restaurant. You may need to make a reservation. Make sure to practica tu español.
The meal was amazing.
I love cooking steak. I’ve gotten pretty good at making filet mignon—it’s hard to mess up—to the point where I rarely order steak at restaurants because I usually walk away disappointed. This may have been the best filet I’ve ever had.
Mission accomplished.
I think one of the things I enjoyed most about the trip to Avila—in addition to the fabulous meal that merited four photos—was that we were able to figure it out on our own and just do it. Sure, that’s how I had spend my semester in 2005 as an undergrad, but it was refreshing to be able to go through it again and plan it all out and just make it happen. Take the metro to the train station and just go. At least now you can buy tickets on your phone.
“Where are all of the pictures from visiting businesses? Wasn’t this a trip for school?” Yes, it was, and I shared some photos from some of the businesses we visited in my last post. But I wanted this post to be about travel in general.
We often frame our lives in terms of work or school or the myriad tasks that help us feel some sort of accomplishment when we go to bed at night. But those things are only a part of our lives. Travel is formative in a way that those other things are not. It changes you.
I had forgotten how long it had been since I had last been to Europe, which is one of the few times I’ve really travelled. Yes, I’ve been on business trips and I’ve taken vacations, but there’s something different about just showing up in a city with no real plans and just taking it all in.
Back when my wife and I were in Europe in 2009 for our honeymoon, I remember thinking that we’d want to come back with our kids some day. I kept thinking they’d need to be older or that we’d need to budget to bring the whole family. But now I’m not so sure that’s true. Perhaps the time is now.