Finding our "travel legs" again...

I’m buying an airline ticket for the complete tour of the South Pacific.  My ticket should cost about $390 which is about what I will get from the Peace Corps as “leave” money.  A lot of the volunteers from the second group are traveling together on a package tour.  About 20 of them went to Fiji.  I couldn’t think of a worst way to go.  

(excerpt from Art’s letter written home on November 19^th, 1968 from Fasito’outa, Western Samoa)

            While drinking our coffee this morning and thinking of our upcoming walking trip to Brittany in just a few days, I suddenly sat up and was reminded of how sharp we will have to be as we set off on this new adventure in France. In a moment of panic I thought “are we going to be able to handle it on our own?”  Of course, we have done this all our married life from the days we met in remote Asuncion, Paraguay. We will be fine. But it’s easy to feel like we may have become lazy and a tiny bit helpless after staying home comfortably for many months as we have done this past winter.

            “I feel out of practice,”  I said to Art.  

            “I like the adventure of it all…” he replied as he always does.  “We won’t be herded in a group to board a train, boat, or a bus.  I like that.”   He’s been saying this for the 45 years I have known him.  Even before we ever met, he felt exactly the same as a 22-year old Peace Corps volunteer about to travel the South Pacific. At 22, he had never traveled internationally until he left for the Peace Corps.  I decided he must have been born with a sense of adventure and a strong “travel bug”. 

         No group trip for us this time.  Admittedly there is comfort and security in group travel.  We had that experience last October on a 17-day Road Scholar trip to the Balkans visiting five countries by bus.

            “It’s an experiment,” I told Art before we left. “Everyone around here does it (meaning our age group) and says they are great.”

            “We can try it once…and see how it goes,” Art replied.

             We did see much and learned the history of the countries that were formerly Yugoslavia. When it came time to decide how and where to travel this spring, we both said, “let’s not do another group trip for a while.”  

 
       When we leave home on Thursday we will rewaken a lifetime of good travel sense to get ourselves first to Paris…easy.  Then we find the bus from Charles de Gaulle airport, into the city, check our detailed Paris map to the booked hotel near the Gare Montparnasse for a good night’s rest. We’ll be up the next morning for breakfast and a walk to the Gare Montparnasse.  There we find our train to Guingamp which leaves close to noon. Once on board, we shall have to stay alert till we change trains for Paimpol.  Getting off in Paimpol there will be a taxi to meet us and take us to Kerbors and our first country hotel.

            “We made it,” we will say to one another as we celebrate our arrival in Brittany over a glass of wine.  Then we’ll reread the walking notes we have for the next day and the adventure begins.

            That is how our walking trips go.  For the next six days we will be on our own to wake up, gather our hiking gear and/or pack up so that our suitcase will be transferred to the next hotel.  Each day is different. Once on our walk  it’s only us  with walking notes and a day pack with a picnic and rain gear and extra clothing… or not.  It’s always a gamble what to take and whether we’ll be prepared for what we encounter that day along the way.  

            Navigating the daily hikes you have to stay sharp and alert.  My head suddenly fills with French that is familiar but that I hadn’t thought about since my last trip in France.  As I walk along I practice phrases in my head of how to ask for things we might need or just to make some friendly comments.  I can do that because the French comes back so quickly and my confidence grows each day. I love being out in the world where I can use my dormant language skills.  I stay alert to all that is around me thinking of what I must note down in my journal once I’m back at the hotel.

            Art likes to carry the walking notes which are protected in a plastic sleeve. He is ahead of me, paying attention and telling me the next landmark we need to be looking for.  Then we become a real team.  We rely on one another for language, navigating skills, and taking notes of what we want to remember...and, of course, some picture taking.  We have done this in Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and France, and loved it.  

            Once our walk ends on the seventh day in Perros-Guirec, we will catch a train to St. Brieuc and then change trains for Dinan -  a medieval village we read about in Rick Steves Brittany guide that is a “must see”. By May 13^thwe will be on our way to Paris with one or two train changes along the way before arriving again at the Gare Montparnasse.  A taxi will get us to an Airbnb I booked which overlooks the Luxembourg Gardens. 

          This time Paris will be familiar as we spent 10 days there two years ago.  I still have my trusty Metro map which we used daily to get around by subway. What to do in Paris?  The city is endlessly wonderful but this time we have already purchased timed tickets to the Louvre. (On our last trip we refused to queue for hours to get in and so we skipped it.)  We must have known we’d come back soon.  

            By the time we board the plane back to the US, my French will be good, and we will have experienced a walk along the Granite Coast of Brittany.  As soon as we get home and rest up, we will be booking another walking adventure in England for the fall. I remind myself that it’s easy to lose your sense of adventure in the comfort and routine of home.  But, each new experience reminds me that we have always thrived on international travel where we can explore a new part of the world on our own.  The difference now is that we don’t take it for granted but are grateful that we are still doing it in our 70’s. 

Long Ago and Far Away

I have moved to my new village and family. I live in a true Samoan hut with no sides.  The only real pain is changing clothes which must be done with a lava lava(printed cloth) wrapped around me.  The food is good so I won’t be starving.  Each night a different family feeds me.  I had many visitors today coming to see the new person in their village.  I’m living directly opposite a school and there is a gargantuan church which I have to attend on Sundays (grins).

January 1968 – Fasito’outa, Western Samoa

First Peace Corps group to arrive in Western Samoa

            Art and I have embarked on an unusual project this spring – that of reading and transcribing his Peace Corps letters that are now 50 years old. In 1967 after graduating from college, he joined the Peace Corps in part to avoid the draft but he also had a genuine interest in international affairs and foreign cultures. He wrote home each week from his thatched hut in Western Samoa to his parents, Ceil and Herm, to his brother, Norm, and sister and brother-in -law, Saralee and Peter.  

  

            For years (since we married in 1975),  we have been storing and moving folders of blue air letters with exotic stamps, addressed to New Haven, Connecticut, written in tiny, cramped longhand .  Blue air letters were often difficult to  squeeze very much news onto.  Art wrote in one of his first letters, “I haven’t yet figured out these envelopes as to where I’m supposed to write…”(Oct. 1967)

Art in his Samoan dwelling where he wrote his letter home.

I moved into my new hut and like it better than the other one though is a bit crowded with all the furniture.  I removed a couple of pieces including the huge bed and now I sleep on a mattress on the floor which is more comfortable because the bed was too short.

Every week, Art wrote to his family faithfully recording details of his daily life in a small, remote, Samoan village.  The surprising result is that his mother kept every letter and must have given them to Art when he returned home before we ever met. These letters have been with us through 11 moves we’ve made over the years along with many other “saved” letters of my mother’s life in South America and mine.  We have filing cabinets full of adventurous accounts of lives lived in faraway places.  All have been waiting for a future  moment when there might be time to read and do something with them.

            Recently, while moving the contents of some filing cabinets to prepare for new carpeting, I came across the “Samoa letters” which we had not thought about for years. This time, instead putting them away to be read another time, I set them out and decided now is the “future” we have been saving them for.  Handing them to Art, I suggested he reread them. I knew he would be captivated by his own account of the first international adventure of his life. I was right. I volunteered to type them with Art dictating at my side . (I need him to interpret his own hard-to-decipher handwriting).  “Project Peace Corps Letters” is now launched and is becoming an enjoyable part of our evening’s entertainment when we aren’t busy with other things.

 Art with his Samoan father...

Art's Samoan parents...

            Beyond the enjoyment of reading these I have loved listening to Art’s “voice”  expressed through writing about his daily life.  For me, it’s an insight into Art as a young man, before we ever met.  I like how he strives to keep up a positive voice reassuring his parents on the other side of the world that he is content.  

Life in the village is just fine. Everybody is still being very nice to me which makes life here good.

When he writes so positively about where he is I realize he has not changed over the years.  This confirms for me that he was born with a positive attitude . Each day he sees the positive first – always.

Despite never having traveled nor experienced life without modern amenities he writes

I finally had one of the kids in the family take some antenna wire up a coconut tree and now the radio pulls in all the stations from Honolulu. I was really surprised at the difference.  I originally had the wire going to our clothes line which was worthless. Now the trouble is that anybody in the fale(hut) who hears it, says “turn to the Samoan stations”.  It doesn’t occur to them I might enjoy an American radio station to Samoan music.  Oh well!

 Bathing daily in the public bathing pool....

          I have learned that his was not a “busy” life as we know it today for living in a small village not much happened. His life was not structured in any way and he had to find his own projects to do such as helping the District nurse,  building water seal toilets, and eventually teaching middle school. Families were close, people friendly, and hosting an American for two years was an honor.  

 Living in the midst of an extended Samoan family

          Interspersed in the letters are comments such as “ two of the volunteers left this week to go home”, or “10 volunteers have already left since we started last fall”.  There seemed to be constant dropouts and yet Art’s letters never express any such wish to want to be anywhere else except where he was.  He was no quitter and never has been.

         We have no deadline for completing this project but now that we've begun we will continue until all the letters are typed. Then we'll include some photos and clippings and put them into a bound book.  Copies have already been requested by people in the family. One copy along with the original letters will be sent to the archives at American University in Washington D.C. where they are already gathering and saving such documents for future research. We have also learned recently that there is a committee working hard to fund raise and find a building in Washington D.C. to start a Peace Corps Museum which will house memorabilia of return volunteers since the Peace Corps was started in March 1961.

          Art's Peace Cops experience set the tone and the course he followed in his life for the next fifty years. There is no better proof of this than reading these letters.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled

by and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost