Wanderlust and Reflections on Traveling with Women

by Joan N.

I don’t know about you, but I am never more desirous of traveling than immediately after returning from a trip. Once I’ve touched base with family, home, things familiar and convenient(!), the wanderlust kicks in BIG TIME. I’m even more anxious to travel than the day I left on my latest journey. I’ve traveled a fair amount - over more years than I care to admit to - and always have the same reaction.

I recently escorted 20 great women to Florence on a tour and a surprise visit to Montecatini (but that’s a whole other story.) During the trip - I think on a bus ride from Chianti to Rada - one of my travel-mates, Kathy from Minneapolis, introduced me to travel essays. Now I’m not the type of person to leave home without a fair amount of research about my destination. My pre-trip modus operandi usually includes (at a bare minimum) purchasing one or two guidebooks — and that’s after spending hours in Barnes & Noble reviewing them all. I will have gone online a gazillion times to check weather, special events/happenings. I will definitely know all the best restaurants and where the shopping deals are - and I almost always purchase an audio cassette and dictionary to familiarize myself with a new language. But travel essays? That was new to me.

So upon my return and still deep in the throes of the travel bug, I purchased A Woman’s Passion for Travel and there in the introduction I found a passage that set my recent trip in perspective.
“…what makes a journey rich and memorable for most women is not so much the places we visit, but the people we meet. Indeed, developing or deepening a relationship can be the most important aspect of a journey; that relationship may be with ourselves, a travel companion, or someone met along the way.”

And so that set me to thinking about the trip to Florence and some special moments that made the trip memorable. I’ll start with Janice who pre-trip almost had to cancel. Then due to a snafu with her connecting flight from Minneapolis wound up having to take a later transfer flight from Milan to Florence than the rest of the group. Though we just barely got to know her in JFK and on the flight over, we were uniformly sympathetic and dedicated to retrieving her luggage (which made our flight even though she couldn’t). Ironically, when we landed in Florence, our victory was short. We had Janice’s luggage but most of the rest of the groups’ luggage was left in Milan (but that, again, is a whole other story). Later that day, there was a collective and very warm welcome when she showed up at the hotel in time for our first dinner together.

When traveling to a foreign place, you see so many sights…churches, museums, statues…and they often fade or blend in your memory. The Pitti Palace and the Bargello were fabulous institutions and we were lost in their splendor while visiting, as too was the wonderful Pintoriccio library in the Santa Maria Assunta church in Siena. But memorable, too, were the afternoons we spent at the farmhouse in San Gimignano and the castle/winery in Chianti that had more to do with people and lifestyles than history. On this trip, the group camaraderie was high. We did a lot of laughing, a lot of sharing…and, there were also some interesting encounters made along the way with people outside our group. Lois from North Carolina appreciated certain of the art hanging in a restaurant in Lucca and learned from the maitre’ d that the artist was local and had a gallery in town. Hopeful, and undaunted by the fact that most everything in town was closed till 4:00 P.M., Lois took off alone in search of the gallery. When we next caught up with her at the bus she had a wonderful adventure to tell us…she found the gallery closed but saw the artist’s name on a nearby door and ventured up a flight stairs where she met the artist in his home. With limited to naught commonality of language, Lois managed to explain she liked his art…and he, flattered by her visit, found a sketch and signed it for her as a gift.

And so it goes when you travel. You open yourself up to all kinds of experiences and meeting all kinds of people. For me, personally, I found it was great fun to travel with 20 women. Another passage that particularly caught my eye in this book:

”We [women] move more slowly through the world,
perhaps because we are tuned to the footsteps behind us.”

And that’s the way it was with our group in Florence. As Kathy said, it was great to have so many “sisters” to help her decide which leather coat to buy. Another woman observed, “no matter who you sat next to at dinner or strolled beside in the street, the conversation flowed.” Despite coming from so many regions across the country for this tour, it was just second nature to look after each other.

I can’t wait for my next trip!

To reserve space in this or other tours from Women’s Travel Club contact:

The Women’s Travel Club
200 Broadacres Drive
Bloomfield, NJ 07003
800-480-4448

Looking for Beth’s book recommendations for this topic? Click here!