WHAT DO RICK STEVES and SAINT AUGUSTINE HAVE IN COMMON?
They want you to travel outside your own country.
Saint Augustine, “The World is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
Rick Steves has built a huge business encouraging and helping people, especially Americans, travel outside the United States. But it’s not just a business to him; he has a commitment to the amazing impact of travel. As Sam Anderson wrote in his recent profile of Steves in the New York Times Magazine, “The tiniest exposure to the outside world, he [Steves] believes, will change your entire life. Travel, Steves likes to say, ‘wallops your ethnocentricity’ and ‘carbonates your experience’ and ‘rearranges your cultural furniture.’ Like sealed windows on a hot day, a nation’s borders can be stultifying. Steves wants to crack them open, to let humanity’s breezes circulate. The more rootedly American you are, the more Rick Steves wants this for you. If you have never had a passport, if you are afraid of the world, if your family would prefer to vacation exclusively at Walt Disney World, if you worry that foreigners are rude and predatory and prone to violence or at least that their food will give you diarrhea, then Steves wants you — especially you — to go to Europe. Then he wants you to go beyond.”
YES! I could have made the title “What do Rick Steves, Saint Augustine, and I have in common.” I am totally committed to the belief that travel outside one’s own country is an essential part of maturity, wisdom, and one’s education. But if you must go on a guided tour or in a group, choose wisely, make sure you are truly exposed to the culture and people of the country you are visiting, don’t just traipse through museums and check off iconic sites. Check out Steves’ website for starters: https://www.ricksteves.com/ You can read the entire NYT Magazine profile there too.
As I wrote in the last chapter of Voice of a Voyage, my travel memoir about our 10-year circumnavigation, “Hatred, bias, divisiveness, and prejudice are as much poisons as those that we use to pollute the soil, air, and water. In the diversity of our languages, skin colors, customs, and beliefs is found the human beauty of this planet. I learned, saw, felt, and continue to believe that there is a desperate need for stewardship by all of us for the cultures and environment of this special planet Earth. This is part of the place I now know. This is part of me, where I started and now have returned.”
Bali Ha’i III with the courtesy flags from many of the countries we visited as we enter Fort Lauderdale’s harbor,
ten years after we left.