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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.
Actually, I do know them or at least enough people like that that I don’t have to speculate. I went to college with many of them and live in Overland Park, KS. I’m drawing partially from personal experience and stuff I saw for several years on my Facebook feed. There is a lot of shallowness out there. Not everybody is shallow, of course. But a lot are.
In the 2021 Marriott Annual Report, Marriott hosted 152 million guest nights in 2021. I doubt you went to college with “many of them”.
I used Marriott as an example because it’s a chain.It’s pretty sanitized, as all chains are. I’ve stayed in one myself at times. That’s not really travel, though. It’s about insulating yourself. Travel is about making yourself vulnerable and meeting people who are radically different. I read your comment to mean that I don’t understand middle class and upper middle class motivations. I think I do. They’re partially my own. That’s all I mean. When I said I went to college with many of them, all I meant was that I was around the elite class and the upper middle class. And I live in a place that is very upper middle class. I’m just familiar with people from those classes.
In the 70s, I hitchhiked from Seattle to San Diego over to Houston, taking a bus to Maryland. All while wondering where I wanted to live. Chose Cali. No doubt, one of the richest experiences of my life.
Douglas, after reading your article, I occurred to me that we could probably divide experiences into at least two categories: shallow and deep.
I would classify as shallow experiences those expensive resort vacations you describe. Such experiences strike me as comet-like: they shine brightly for a while, then fade away. You may recall them fondly years later, but they don’t do much to change your character.
Deep experiences, it seems to me, have a profound affect on your character. Sharing intimate moments with your parents and grandmother, and your trek across Europe, indeed helped mold you. You appear to have emerged from those experiences a better, more mature, and wiser person—something that resort visits are unlikely to provide.
I totally identify with your philosophy that one does not have to leave home to discover diamonds. As a child, I spent two weeks each year on my grand-mother’s remote farm in order to have something to report to the fall “show and tell” class. Little did I realize that a taste of farm life would instill lasting values in my life: Value of hard work (picking cotton), appreciation for
black persons and their labor who predated me, simplicity of life, trust-worthiness, healthy lifestyle (veggies galore), and importance of sleep. While I have toured Europe several times and learned much, the farm lessons in-
spired me differently and lastingly. And I shall always cherish such experiences.
Couldn’t agree more. I have friends who will only stay in resort style hotels and see little of the area they are visitng. My attitude has always been: 1) I want a room that is clean and convenient to the things that I want to see, and 2) to spend as much time sightseeing and as little time in my hotel room as possible.
I so envy your adventures. I would never be so bold to do what you did at your age. I have seen a lot of the world but always went either with the military or with travel groups. I can’t imagine being 20 and spending four months running around Europe like you did. That has to be the best $4,000 ever spent!
When we were in our 30s, 40s, 50s, and maybe even in our early 60s, we traveled in very similar ways. I remember buying a 30-day Eurail Pass and deciding which country to go to next based on the weather forecast. We had a B&B book for Europe and had the phone numbers of places we were considering. We always stayed in the “old town” section since the train station was usually a short walk to that B&B location. I learned a lot about local travel (bus schedules to further extend our access). I even took language lessons, which also made it easier to engage in a conversation with locals. We stayed at youth hostels where we helped clean rooms and participate in group exercises. Those were great times that also created great memories. However, we tend to forget the “agonies” of travel such as sitting next to a crying infant for eight hours, having a toddler kick the back of your airplane seat, sitting in cramped seats with no knee room, or having to stand in long lines at the airport.
Soon after I retired, I almost lost my wife to cancer (twice). That was a wake-up call that made it easier to spend versus being frugal. In that we still enjoyed traveling, my focus was to reduce the travel “agonies.” Toward that end, traveling first class eliminated a whole slew of such issues. When traveling in Europe, you get used to having rooms the size of a walk-in closet. Nowadays, we can afford a suite or one bedroom unit making such accommodations more comfortable. We don’t go to “exotic” locations but places we have dreamed about going, looking for such experiences. It’s true that now that we are in our mid-70s, we tend to go on more guided tours rather than using a guidebook and rolling our own. Even under these conditions, we are still quite active and put in over 10K steps per day on average. At this point, it is somewhat of a compromise between making such experiences possible versus minimizing the stress of traveling.
While much travel is about experiences, we also spend one month every winter in a warm weather location (typically Hawaii, Florida, or the Caribbean). When we go there, our goal is just to relax, eat good food, and enjoy the weather. I also invite our adult children to accompany us to one trip per year (all expenses paid) and often get their input for destination options.
Several years into my work career my father and I would take two weeks every year or so and travel the country by car. I kept a recap of those trips, and they are a great reminder of the fun times we had. Looking back, we could have gone anywhere and I would have enjoyed that time with my father. We also made several four trips to see his mother, so your article touched on another fun memory for me. Dad always said, “Memories are the stuff life is made of.” It looks like you had some great “stuff” in your life.
One of the most beautiful sites to visit at home—Washington Crossing State Park. a 3,575 acre New Jersey State park, part of Washington’s Crossing, a U.S. natural historic landmark area.
this park, together with Washington Crossing Park on the Pennsylvania side comprise Washington Crossing National Historic Landmark. So much to see, do, observe and learn from. Vistas and captured views offer stunning perspective of landscape features.
spectacular in the fall season.
Great Post Douglas!
I have 2 things left on my travel “bucket list”.
See the Pyramids at Giza. There is a longer length of time between their building and Cleopatra … than there is between Cleopatra and NOW.
Sail into New York Harbor steaming past The Statue of Liberty the way my recent ancestors did when they came to America.
While sharing both with my wife of over 4 decades.
As to traveling with Mom and Dad as a child to visit relatives … those are great and lasting memories and experiences!
You can see the Statue of Liberty for free on the Staten Island ferry.
I’ve seen the pyramids at Giza and I was surprised to find I wasn’t impressed. Great big piles of great big stones…. Some of the temples, on the other hand, were very impressive.
Prior to 1975 you could drive your car right onto the Staten Island Ferry for 5 cents. That went the way of the nickel beer, nickel cigar, nickel phone call and nickel candy bar.
no vehicular traffic now.
Winston. I’ve also thought about doing the sailing into NY harbor to mimic what my Irish ancestors experienced.
When my son was studying in Cairo, I visited him and we went out to see the pyramids at Giza. Turning our backs to the Sphinx and looking to the street nearby, we saw…. a Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I have to say, that sort of detracted from the moment.
On our first trip to Ireland someone said “the American embassy will be on your right.” It was a McDonalds
Great article and totally agree. On a long trip I like an occasional rest on a tropical beach or in a more upmarket hotel, but otherwise I find budget travel much more fun and at least as interesting. Good family time is, of course, priceless.
Travel inhabits different purposes. None are inferior or superior to the others. Rest, Learning, Service. My family does all three. We serve at an orphanage in Mexico each year. Next month, my wife and I are taking a trip to Switzerland and Italy with one of my daughters. Valuable one-on-on time with her and an exposure to different cultures and languages. And, due to a very hectic job role, rest is invaluable so we hit the beach and do nothing for a week each year. All three types possess unique qualities and benefits and we are blessed to be able to do them all. I agree with prior comments, international travel is invaluable to help children better understand and engage their world. Not everyone can do it but, if you can, you should.
Douglas, this is a wonderful article and with just a few changes in details, might have been written by one of my adult children, as my husband and I spent many summer vacations taking our kids to visit elderly relatives. Now, as a retired grandmother, I had been focusing my plans for family vacations on high-end resorts and exotic locations. Your article made me reset my ideas of a great vacation and appreciate even more the value of family time together, even if it’s just sitting together in each other’s homes (one kid has an in-ground pool, so that’s a resort at home 😊). Thank you.
If you can afford a family vacation at a high end resort, do it! Just because the author doesn’t approve of it should not matter. Experiences are what family remember, and you can have both kinds. Spend time with family doing things at home, and stay at beautiful resorts. The authored makes a sweeping generalization based on his experiences. Not all glitzy vacations are for the purpose of sharing on social media
People, places, experiences are invaluable. No better way to learn IMO. Our understanding of the world is enhanced by travel – not sitting on some glitzy beach though. Not a day goes by I don’t recall a past experience in a far away place or just from visiting George Washington’s Revolution headquarters five miles from my house.
We are hoping we have one or two more trips in us- Iceland and cruising the Adriatic look good.
R Quinn…
I worked at The American College in 2005 and from 2009-2015. I lived in Bryn Mawr, PA. After work, in the evenings, I use to love to ride my Honda Goldwing through Valley Forge, and I remember the building you mentioned, Washington’s HQ. Not sure if that is the one you are referring to however.
I hoped to travel to Ireland and Germany this coming June, for our 50th Wedding Anniversary, since we are both Army Brats and spent parts of our childhoods in Germany and we are both “Irish Americans.” Unfortunately, my bride has no desire to leave the US. She feels Americans are disrespected in Europe and she has no desire to be involved in anti-Muslim Riots, like the ones in Dublin Ireland, Paris France and London England, a few months ago.
Just returned from Iceland yesterday … Fantastic … Experiencing the Northern Lights was incredible and scratched a big item off my bucket list
Dick, for you and others interested in the Adriatic, I suggest OAT’s (Oversea Adventure Travel) small ship cruise of the Dalmatian coast. We did that a couple of years ago and loved it, especially the focus on local culture including being hosted for dinner one evening by a local farm family.
Jerry, thanks. My wife and I were looking at that trip a few days ago for 2024.
Dick, two thumbs up for the Adriatic. My daughter-in-laws family is from Croatia. We spent a gear two weeks visiting her and our son, meeting her extended family, and touring some of Croatia and Bosnia. One of the most beautiful places you’ll see and great people
Richard, I took the grandson to Iceland during Thanksgiving week last year and we had a great time. Group of 12, and the other ten “adopted” the grandson so he didn’t feel weird being the only youngster. Best chance of seeing the Northern Lights is in the winter. Have fun. Both destinations sound great.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. Coincidentally, my grandfather worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and my son went to Penn. And my children know about my work on behalf of others, and my son has participated in that.
I could not agree more. Thank you for this article.