Marc on the Travel Bug

To be honest, I don't know what causes some people to get the travel bug. You mentioned how small the world has become, and maybe because of cable TV, travel shows, and the internet, people don't feel the need to travel anywhere in person. They just sit in their lounger in the living room and watch Rick Steves walking through the Sistine Chapel and say, "Wow, cool."

For those of us that have been lucky enough to travel, we know that watching it on TV isn't the same as being there. I'm sure that you guys would say that walking across the "Old Bridge" in Mostar isn't quite the same as seeing it on a YouTube video. Laying on the beach on the Costa del Sol in Spain isn't the same as reading about it in a travel book. I guess my point is that unless you've experienced it, you just don't realize the fun of traveling. You also have to do it once or twice to realize that it's not as "exotic impossible" as you might think. I never ever imagined that we would have a boys weekend in Sarajevo, Bosnia, but we figured it out!

I'm amazed at how many of my classmates from OCHS have never been outside the United States, or even outside of the State of Iowa. I'm sure that you know some people like that. When you talk about traveling to Europe, or Africa, or Asia, you can tell that they're not even really "in" the conversation. It's all a bit far out or fantastic to them, like a science fiction book that you can't really seriously consider.

On a side note, I have noticed a HUGE change in the military culture since I joined back in the "Join the Navy, see the world" days. When we put in our "dream sheets" during school in Monterey, everyone that I know wanted to go overseas. The last thing any of us wanted was to stay in the United States for a tour of duty. In my graduating class, of the 15 or 20 Sailors that I knew, only two had orders to stay in the USA, and those were the "unlucky" ones. But things are different now. Not only do you have to drag people kicking and screaming to the overseas billets these days, most of the new military crowd don't even want to go to another station within the USA! They want to be somewhere like San Antonio, Texas, and do an entire military career there. It's just a different military and sometimes it baffles me. Granted, the overseas opportunities are far more limited now, but that should make it even easier to find people to fill those billets.

As I look back at my own travels, traveling and living overseas has creates a unique bond with people. It has created catalogues of memories for me. Today I sat around the lunch table with a few other old Chiefs like myself, and we found ourselves telling stories about the glory days, and almost all of them were from an overseas tour or an overseas deployment. We as brothers have some great memories of traveling or meeting in other parts of the world together. Jennifer and I often talk about our days back in Spain and when we do they seem to have been the best days of our lives.

I don't know if it's a bug at all; maybe some people are just predisposed to wanting to have a broader perspective of the world we live in. At any rate, I'm very thankful for all the opportunities that I've had to travel!