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Page Two

 

Once or twice a year, Christa and I would go on a vacation, usually for two weeks at a time. One of the more memorable trips Christa and I made was a fortnight in the high mountains of Guatemala, where we worked hard building houses for poor families with Elderhostel and Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village Program.

The building sites were in a small village almost eight thousand feet above sea level, where the air was very thin and hard to breathe. We had to sit down and rest every ten minutes or so, just to get our breath. At night we went back to a cheap hotel in the village where the rooms were not heated. In spite of piling blankets on the bed, I have never in my life been so cold for so long. We finished the houses on schedule nonetheless and were given a wonderful sendoff by the new owners.

We visited Christa’s relatives in Germany and Crete several times, spent Christmas with our daughter and her family in the Philippines and went four times to visit our youngest and his wife in Hawaii, California and the Canadian Rockies (no grandchildren, just two grand dogs).

I go up to Andover, Massachusetts, once or twice every year to visit my sister Carolyn. Christa and I have circled the globe twice by air, made two Atlantic crossings by sea, cruised around the Eastern Caribbean, sailed the Aegean and gone down the Danube and across the Black Sea to Istanbul in Russian ships.

In 1996 we made an abortive attempt to become Florida tax residents (no state income tax) by spending six months and a day each winter in the Keys. Hurricane Georges scored a hit on our waterfront house on Big Pine Key on September 25, 1998, removing a corner of our roof, while completely destroying another couple’s dream retirement home nearby. The other couple bought our house for the asking price, which included a tidy capital gain, desperate to have a roof over their heads, even a damaged one. Nowadays we try to spend just the month of February down south, preferring the Gulf Coast, near two of our children and their families.

I have traveled to Ireland a total of seven times over the years, visiting my Irish cousins and searching for my roots. Christa came along on two of those trips, and on one of them, we brought our elder son, his wife and their three children (the only Malone grandchildren) along with us. Although I can claim only 13/32 of Irish blood, I am nuts about Ireland.

I even have an Irish passport and harbor fantasies of running away from home and going to live there someday. I know I won’t, though, because I would miss my kids and grandchildren too much (not to mention Christa, my faithful traveling companion for the last forty-seven years, who doesn’t like Ireland at all!). Still, I think I would like to go over there one more time while I am still able to go for long walks in the hills.

My two books have involved me in a lot of travel also, first attending writers’ workshops in North Carolina and doing research in Ireland and in the various locales of Pennsylvania and Ohio where my ancestors and I were born and raised, and then going back a year or two later to the same places for the book signings. Those excursions really were “ego trips.”

Lately I have joined the board of an international non-profit, the GOAL Project, which helps to extend AA’s life-saving twelve-step program of recovery from addiction to countries where it is either unknown or just getting started. I travel to GOAL’s Pittsburgh headquarters twice a year for board meetings and will likely get to visit some of the countries where our projects are located in the next few years.

Speaking of addiction, I am beginning to realize that I am probably addicted to travel. If I am stuck in one place too long, I start to get restless. Christa calls it “Wanderlust.” She says she has had enough traveling to last the rest of her life. She is happy, she says, to stay in our nice little house on the outskirts of Waynesville, North Carolina, gardening and playing tennis in the summer and quilting in the winter.

I wonder.

 

 
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Part One of Traveling

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