Answering your questions: If I could travel in time I would go forward two thousand years right where I am to see what had become of the world. I would most like to watch great apes in the wild, from a remove to protect them. If I could attend one festival it would be the August Edinburgh Festival Fringe. An indulgent binge of wow, I think. Finally, the most over-rated tourist spot is for me…well I always find something interesting everywhere at the very least anthropologically.

On June 6, 1994, I called in sick to work so that my mother and I together could watch the TV coverage of the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Though my father died in 1978, I had heard many times the story of how he was in North Africa on June 6 of 1944, and when the invasion came, he and the American troops were rushed to Europe, how he went to Paris in time to see the Liberation, and to Belgium at the end of the Battle of the Bulge. I had been told of the things he saw, the things a young, nearly illiterate man from Nebraska would never have seen had it not been for the war… I wanted to honor that, and honor my mother’s memory of the homefront during WWII.

It was only after my mother died in 1998 that I went to Arromanches and saw the beaches and the American Cemetery, and sobbed over the crosses of the “Known But to God.” I wish that my mother might have been able to go with me… but by visiting and laying flowers at the grave of a soldier unknown to me, a teenage who by now should be a great-great-grandfather dandling babies on his knee (including the German youths who really had no choice when they were shot down at just 18), I felt that I was respecting them, and admiring the Europe that they saved and helped shape.

Now I travel with my husband, who had never been out of the USA until we met. I told him that I traveled and I intended to continue, with or without him. He says that travel has given him a much more informed view of how the USA is seen from abroad, and makes him a better world citizen. He’s much more able to appreciate diverse world cultures now that he’s talked with people from other countries on their turf, and been aware that he was now the foreigner who is regarded with some bemusement and slight apprehension…. not the other way around.

I consider myself incredibly fortunate that my parents drummed into us (my two brothers and I) the experiences of WWII, both from a soldier’s pint of view and from the life of stateside civilians. I think it was those stories, the viewpoint that these few years of the 20th century were the most important of the modern age, shaped my interest beyond the USA, and eventually led to my travel beyond our borders… Though I still hope that Paul McCartney will come to his senses and realize he missed out by passing me by.