Family matters

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those that matter don’t mind.” – Dr Seuss

I rang Michelle on Sunday night,  “I’m leaning towards going.  How much were the airfares again?”  She squealed.  I guess that means she’s happy for me to be a saddo tag-along, copycat.

The next hurdle was telling our parents.  Yes, Virginia, you still have to worry about what your parents think when you’re in your 30s and 40s.  Why? Because we love them and want to maintain happy relations with them, whenever possible.  The only difference from when you were younger is that now, you’ll probably do what you want to, despite what they say.

Michelle has a long history of telling her parents about her somewhat unusual travel plans,  going around the world with me for 9 weeks (2000), taking her long service leave to do volunteer work in the US, England, Ireland, Scotland, etc (2002), walking across Spain (2006, I think) - and then the Habitat builds in Nepal.

My mom is gone, as is my brother, but I won’t get into that long, sad tale here.  Suffice it to say that my stubborn (yet loveable) 82 year-old father lives on his own in San Diego.  This is despite that fact that he is legally blind.  Either John or I go and visit him at least once a year, we call once or twice a week, we help out with rent and whatever else we can, but ultimately I live here, in Adelaide, South Australia, and I feel guilty as hell that I don’t do more.  Dad loves adventure and traveling but there are different rules for his daughter and what is appropriate.  I’m pretty sure he would consider any developing country to not be appropriate, but who knows - he may surprise me.  I know that when we were kids, it was Dad’s idea to do an African safari but Mom put the kibosh on that idea.  We also never went anywhere further south than Naples in Italy.  There were limits to the ‘adventure’ to which we were exposed. 

With my current work, I sometimes have to fly on small planes (single-engine) to outback locations.  Although I really prefer to have a back-up engine when flying, it is not always possible.  Whenever I go on these work trips, Dad worries about me and his last words on the phone are full of dire warnings.  I resolve to wait as long as possible to tell him so as to reduce worry time to a minimum.  Ok, so I’m a coward.

Michelle’s parents are pretty relaxed about her going to Cambodia. She has checked out the travel warnings and found that there are fewer for Cambodia than there were for Nepal.  I guess the argument is that she survived Nepal, so she will probably survive Cambodia.  I’m still waiting for the right time to tell Dad – maybe I’ll call him from the airport…