Ready for Big Bear

I think my love for traveling began about the age of five when my Uncle Clyde bought a rustic cabin at Boulder Bay near Big Bear Lake, California. The area had not been “discovered” then. It was just a sleepy little fishing lake, and the town had one tiny café.

The cabin was made of local pine and fir and had a wood stove in the kitchen and an oil burner in the living room for heat. My parents drove there from our apartment in Santa Monica to spend two or three weeks every summer until my uncle sold it in 1960.

I loved these summer trips. For one thing, I had my parents to myself, and there was no agenda but to have fun. My parents both had jobs, and my mom often worked on Saturdays, so weekends at home were for completing chores or visiting friends and family. But at the cabin, we fished and played cards, and they told stories about growing up in Olean, New York, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There was no television, only radio, so we did jigsaw puzzles and read or just sat on the porch and looked at the stars. Occasionally we went into Big Bear and played Skee Ball at the arcade. From an early age, travel, fun and relaxation have been closely linked in my mind.

Throughout elementary and high school, trips were short journeys to Palm Springs, San Diego or Catalina Island, often with classmates and their parents. Every year, my parents and I went to Disneyland, usually with my friend Jane and my godparents in tow. I remember once we took a boat to Catalina Island and a tiny plane back home. But it wasn’t until I graduated from high school that I traveled out of California.

My friend, Cindy, and her parents took a graduation trip to the east coast by train to visit their relatives in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and they invited me along. It was amazing even though we sat upright the entire trip. Cindy and I spent hours in the dome car trying to figure out what state we were in, and then we arrived at Grand Central Station and were introduced to the wonders of New York City. We saw the sights; we stayed with Cindy’s welcoming Italian relatives and ate marvelous food; we had a wonderful time. I loved it!

Most traveling had to wait until I finished college, got married, and started teaching junior high and high school. In those years, there wasn’t money to do much more than a day trip in the car. My first husband and I moved to Oregon where I taught high school and eventually college, got a divorce, and earned my Master’s Degree and a Doctorate along the way. I also joined the U.S. Army Reserve, originally as a Private First Class and then with a direct commission to Second Lieutenant.

As a college professor, I needed to attend conferences and make presentations, and because of that requirement, I started visiting other states. The military also provided travel opportunities, mostly to Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina where our training bases were located. We had a saying: “Join the Navy; see the world. Join the Army; see the South.” Still travel was travel, and the military taught me self-reliance.

During this time, I went to Europe for the first time with my friend Pat, another female USAR officer. This first trip was a TWA Budget tour, which was really one of those “if it is Tuesday, it must be Belgium” trips. We saw ten countries and dozens of cities in a month, most of it by bus, and rarely got to spend two nights in the same hotel. We even went behind the “Iron Curtain” to Yugoslavia. It was grueling, but I savored every moment of it. I saw so many of the cities and countries I had studied; ate unusual food; saw museums, monuments, people and places that I had heard about but never thought I would actually see. Pat and I were totally hooked. The next year we went back on our own for two months, using backpacks, Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $35 a Day and a Eurail Pass. It was exhilarating, sometimes frightening, always enlightening, and completely addictive.

I returned to the real world and married the most wonderful man, Bill Ruck, and we began to travel together. He took me to Hawaii for the first time. I thought I wouldn’t like it, but the moment the plane touched down in Honolulu, it was love at first sight. We went to Hawaii every year and it became “our special place.”

I took him back to Europe, and together it was even more magical than before.  On that first trip, we drove around England, Scotland and Wales for a month. When we turned our rental car in, the agent laughed at the mileage and said, “This is an island. Where did you go?” A few years later, we would return for a Second Air Division reunion in Norwich, England, and then take a tour of mainland Europe, which included Paris, Vienna, the Matterhorn from Zermatt, and Munich. For another major trip, we took sabbaticals and for two months we explored the United States. We drove to British Columbia several times, visited family all over the U.S. and went to Hawaii annually. It was marvelous.

Then Bill got cancer, and despite our best efforts, he died much too soon.

Perhaps you’ve been in a position where your life changed radically through no fault of your own, and you believed that things would never be quite as wonderful again. That’s where I was in May of 1991, having lost my first best friend, my dad in December 1990, and my beloved Bill six months later. I am an only child, so it was just Mom, me and my two careers. I buried myself at the college and in the military and traveled only for conferences or work.

For the next few years, until Mom died in October 1995, I pretty much stayed close to home. I did inherit from Bill three grown step-children and their families, which was a wonderful legacy, and Mom and I enjoyed visiting them or having them visit us. But there wasn’t much impetus to travel for the fun of it or just to see what was over the next horizon.

You have probably guessed that if I stopped traveling for fun in 1991, I wouldn’t now have a website called Traveling with Carolyne – and you’d be right. Something was going to change again, and you can find out what in my next blog, “When One Door Closes …”

I’ll also bet that many of you have had a “door closing” experience, whether related to travel or just life in general, and then you found that another door, or at least a window, opened for you. If you’d like to share your own “finding a new path” experience, feel free to leave a comment . . . or if not, jump right in to “When One Door Closes …” for the rest of my story.