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WORD ON THE STREET is that, if you want to use money to make yourself happy, you should buy experiences rather than things.
In principle, I couldn’t agree more.
There is, however, one kind of experience that I see touted both in the media and on social media that I don’t think reflects money well spent: the expensive family vacation to a distant destination. This status-symbol experience, complete with selfies at ritzy hotels, is supposedly designed to create priceless memories.
Actually, it’s probably about creating an upper-middle-class status statement, and it implies that the best memories have to be bought at a high price and created in the artificial environment of PF Chang’s and the Marriott. To my mind, this type of experience also introduces kids to a sanitized version of travel.
I’d like to suggest a different course of action—one that, in my experience, does indeed create priceless lifetime memories.
While my family took road trips to places like Toronto, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., these journeys weren’t the crucible of strong childhood memories. Instead, my most precious memories were formed in a very different way: being with my parents when they were serving others.
After my paternal grandfather died in 1980, my father and I would take the two-hour drive every month to my grandmother’s house. During our trips, my father and I would talk for those two hours. When we arrived, my grandmother would make dinner for us. I would hear about what life had been like during the Great Depression and about my grandfather’s job as a signal maintainer on the Pennsylvania Railroad. We would have my grandmother’s homemade cherry pies.
Then my father and I would clean up and do the dishes together. After dinner, we would help my grandmother with chores, like mowing the lawn or working in the garden. Then the three of us would visit my grandfather’s grave. On the way home, my father and I would talk again, and sometimes we’d also listen to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
These trips, while costing practically nothing, bonded my father and me, and taught me about filial duty.
During the summers, my mother took the local census in the suburb where we lived, just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. By July of each year, she had finished with her initial contacts. She would then start her callbacks. My father would drive her to a particular street and wait while she visited the houses on her list. I would often go along and sit in the backseat and read.
One summer, while we sat parked on shady, treelined streets, I read Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. When my mother returned to the car, she would sit in the air-conditioning and drink her Dr. Pepper. After she checked her documents, we’d speed off to her next target. I learned from my mother’s attention to detail, persistence and obsession with getting a job done right.
These experiences cost nothing, but they allowed me to see my parents not in some distant hotel lobby, but at their very best.
Does all this mean that I don’t like to travel and don’t think travel memories are important? Not at all. I think they’re so important that they shouldn’t be turned into some sanitized commodity and, indeed, that good parents should send their kids off to discover the world on their own.
When I was 20, I took a leave of absence from the University of Pennsylvania and bought a Eurail Pass and a one-way ticket from New York to London. I spent four months traveling by myself from England all the way to Istanbul and then back to Western Europe. I flew home from Madrid. My parents knew that this kind of adventure would help me to grow and give me unbelievable memories, so they chipped in a few thousand dollars, and told me to get to an embassy and call if I got into trouble. I spent less than $4,000 over those four months.
During the trip, I learned about the world and people. My mouth dropped open as I sat in my cheap Leicester Square theatre seat. The curtains parted, and Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave stood some 10 feet away. In Cologne, at the Ludwig Museum, I saw Max Ernst’s very funny The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before Three Witnesses. A day trip on the train from Barcelona took me to the melting clocks of the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres.
On the way to Spain, I drove with a French nurse in her pink Lada jeep from Paris through the Pyrenees at sunset. I hung out with an English gypsy named Julian at a hotel on the Greek island of Naxos, where I also rented a motorcycle and cruised around the wildflower-filled fields. On a crappy passenger ship from Brindisi to Patras, I drank beer with a 26-year-old female U.S. Navy dentist, who fell over laughing when I got seasick. “Gotta get those sea legs,” she said.
I hitchhiked through Northern Ireland and caught a ride with an Irish geologist through Belfast. He took me down the Falls Road, the scene of much sectarian strife during the Troubles. A Greek truck driver named Theo gave me a lift to Thessaloniki after I had gotten robbed on the beach. When I was leaving Belgrade, where I stayed with university students in a high-rise flat, I shared a train compartment with three Yugo factory workers, who in turn shared schnaps and fried chicken with me.
I learned that the best travel is exhausting, exhilarating and ennobling, and not all that expensive. It’s not something that should be crammed into a week spent at high-priced hotels, with everyone pretending to have a good time. That’s not money well spent.
My parents created great memories for me by taking me with them when they were being who they really were. The cost? Nothing. They also helped me to create my own memories by supporting me when I wanted to push boundaries and see the world.
Douglas W. Texter is an associate professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. Doug teaches a composition I course that focuses on personal finance. His essays and fiction have appeared in venues such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, Utopian Studies, New English Review and The Writers of the Future Anthology. Doug’s previous article was Follow Those Values.
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What a great article. Thanks Douglas!
My dad was career military and I grew up in Germany. Looking back on my early childhood, it is unbelievable to think that when I was 4 years old, I was spending my 2nd year living in Germany. The year was 1954, and I don’t really remember all that much, but the Second World War had only been over for 9 years, and that was amazing to me when I thought back about it years later.
in 1964, after spending my childhood growing up in Germany, speaking German fluently, we moved back to the US. in 1967 we returned to Germany for a brief 18 months, and returned to the US once again. I graduated from high school in the US, but I had only spent 2 of my 12 years in school in the US. One of the few A’s I got in high school was in German! Ha!
While a child, I remember going to museums and seeing famous art. I remember visiting Neuschwanstein Castle, built by King Ludwig of Bavaria, which is the castle Disneyland’s Castle is modeled after. I remember learning to snow ski. I remember living in a huge house in Bavaria, on a lake, that had been the residence of a high ranking Nazi Officer during WWII. I remember living in Berlin, in 1956-1957, when it was still deep in Russian controlled East Germany. I remember going to the brand new American Elementary School, in Bad Tolz Germany, from the 1st to 7th grades. I remember in 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, and my father disappeared for 7-10 days, to learn later that our military was on high alert, incase The Soviet Union tried anything. I remember ice skating and Octoberfests and seeing friends come and go, as their fathers were transferred to their next duty stations. I remember visiting Dachau, near Munich, and learning about the Holocaust. That was a sad day during my 13th year of life.
Your travels were a lot more adventerous than mine, but the bottom line is that only by experiencing life in foreign countries can we really understand and appreciate the privileges we enjoy living in the USA.
And just in case there are any “lefties” trolling HD, if you don’t share my feelings about the USA, I will gladly contribute to your ticket to move to wherever you think life is better, but I won’t bother responding to your posts.
If I can make a personal witness to those posters who feel you are judgmental; Consider that if you try a bit of “rough travel” you might find you like it, even needed it. As a working class American from the South I knew no one who did such things in those days. On a trip to Mexico with a vague idea to visit Chichen Itza and just looking for cheap accommodation I found myself surrounded by young backpackers from all over the world. They spoke multiple languages and had been to amazing places, traveling for months or years at a time, making a game of spending very little. My world seemed very small and I was hooked. It is inoculating against your fears to meet 18year old girls who have hitch hiked across Central America. I am more grateful and empathetic having witnessed real poverty. There is an indescribable feeling of freedom to have been away for a few months with no clear idea when or where the trip will end.
I really like this. It inspires me!
Doug, thanks for an inspiring post. We all learn about each other’s experience reading HD, and the comments are probably the best part. I’m sure everyone looks forward to your next post.
After reading a few years of articles here on Humble Dollar, I have gleaned that the point of accumulating money is to be able to spend it on what matters most.. to that individual. Whether that be travel that is “roughing it” or luxury. Some of the commentary and even the article seem judgemental.. but IMO what others choose to do with their money is their own business.. and I hope they enjoy it!
Although, there is little doubt that there is a substantial amount of conspicuous consumption in our society, which includes both material goods and travel, I agree with oldITGuy that it is probably unfair or unkind to speculate about the motivations of other people. However I will suggest that air travel is a big contributor to climate change. We should our consider our responsibility to be good stewards of the earth in everything we do.
I agree that the most valuable moments in life aren’t hostage to spending a lot of money. I also enjoyed hearing of some of your personal experiences and I agree with those sentiments. But I disagree with your opinion when you stated “Actually, it’s probably about creating an upper-middle-class status statement, and it implies that the best memories have to be bought at a high price and created in the artificial environment of PF Chang’s and the Marriott”. I think that lumps all people who don’t choose to travel as you do as somehow shallow and vain. This sounds a lot like other social criticisms I’ve heard that start with some version of “those people”. I’d suggest your article would have been better if you had refrained from that speculation of the motivations of a large class of people you don’t actually know and stuck to your personal experiences.