When I was growing up, my family didn’t take a lot of vacations. My parents always said that the money that we would have spent towards vacations went towards our extra-curricular activities--private lessons for our instruments, ballet classes for me, new golf clubs, things like that instead. It never really bothered me, because I never thought my family would travel that well as the five of us. We all have very strong personalities and would often clash as teenagers. Our one “vacation” was when we drove my brother to music camp in Michigan. What I consider to be the first “real” vacation with my family was when my Lola took my sister, my mom, me, and my cousins on a cruise to Alaska after I graduated from high school. So, you can imagine my surprise when my Lola announced that they (meaning my Lola, my sister, and my mom) were going to visit me when I studied abroad in Scotland. They worked out details, and decided that they would go to Iceland for a week first and then come to see me in Scotland.
Our trip took us all over Scotland, taking us through the three largest cities in Scotland: Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. We saw the Scottish Highlands, and were amazed at the vast, neverending beauty of them. During the drive, my Lola noted that the Scottish Highlands are on her list of her top five sceneries she’s seen in her lifetime (and for her that’s really saying something since she’s been to over 100 countries and all seven continents). As we saw some of the best of what Scotland has to offer, it began to occur to me that the dynamics were different on this trip. I wasn’t sure whether it was because we haven’t all done a lot of trips together before or the fact that all the kids (including me) are now living adult lives, but I could feel something was different.
Leading up to the trip, I knew that any opportunity for me to travel with my Lola (aka the travel queen, matriarch of my family, and my role model) was a huge one. My sister, Aurora, is 25 and lives in Austin, Texas with her dog, Ella (who is the BEST dog!). Over the past two years or so, my sister and I have gotten a lot closer, and started recognizing one another as equals, adults, and someone who we can count on. My mom, who is a caregiver for my dad, seemed like the most relaxed version of herself that I’ve seen in a while. Everyone seemed more relaxed, more authentically them. They seemed to be like a new, more evolved version of themselves. It’s hard to believe sometimes that people change, that your family will ever be different then they are, but it happened. Maybe growing up makes us feel nostalgic and long for our family, or maybe it just brings us back to the strong roots that we grew up in.
Some of the strongest women I know are the women in my family.
My Lola reminds me to always “be good” as she says, to push myself out of my comfort zone, and to always be a lifelong learner. She earned her Master’s in Linguistics back in 1958 at the University of Michigan, grew up in the Philippines during WWII, and raised her family as one of two Asian families in a primarily white community in small town Illinois. Today, she travels the world, and she’s learning piano. She has this sort of silent aura, where you know that she is wise and someone you can learn from. Multiple times during the trip, my sister, my mom, and I all agreed that we want to be like my Lola when we grow up. At the end of the trip, I just felt pure gratitude and very fulfilled. It seemed as though everyone else felt the same, even if we all didn’t realize that traveling together was what we needed.
