My Best Experiences

Douglas W. Texter  |  Sep 20, 2023

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.