TRAVEL BUG TALES: HEADING IN A NEW DIRECTION
A few weeks ago I realized my series on The Trip with No Name would soon draw to a close. I also realized (thanks to building our new house) there was no room in the short term budget for travel. I wondered what, if anything, I was going to blog about. Of course I would continue to write about events and activities in the Metroplex, but travel is what started this blog. What was I going to do?
Bitten Early by the Travel Bug
I’m no johnnie-come-lately to traveling and I have the Polaroids to prove it. Take that number with me standing in front of the Alamo. I was barely out of single digits, but I already knew my way around a Trip-tik!
What? You don’t know what a Trip-tik is! And I was wondering what I was going to write about?

Well, a Trip-tik was a customized hard copy map of your travel route produced by AAA. GPS wasn’t even dreamed of back in those days – or cellphones or the internet or DVD players to entertain the kids for that matter. And get this. We didn’t have air conditioning in our cars either.
I’ve got to tell you that when I pull into a city or town at the end of a long day of travel, having the Expedia app remind me of my hotel reservations and GPS to guide me there is priceless. However, some of my favorite travel memories are very low tech. While many of my readers remember the days of folded maps, there’s a whole new generation that can’t imagine life without smartphones, much less travel.
Come Along for the Ride

My pre-blogging travel history is rich with wonderful adventures and places you should visit – if only they still existed! I’m going to wander down memory lane and raid my scrapbooks for travel tales. I hope you’ll come along for the ride. Sometimes I’ll focus on the challenges of pre-digital travel and at other times we’ll relish the memory of boarding a plane without going through TSA screening.
Wherever we go and whatever we do, you’ll be with me – so we’ll write joy into every journey. If nothing else, we can laugh at my fashion obsession!
I like your idea. Quite often, I pull out some old travel stories from pictures and journals kept years ago. It’s always fun to reminisce and surprising that others enjoy it as much as today’s travel.
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I love looking back. I think that’s why I have so many photo albums and why I spend so much time browsing through them. I’m hoping people will enjoy remembering when you couldn’t just pull out your smartphone and text “where r u?” to find your traveling companions.
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I still don’t use GPS unless I’m in a hurry. Getting lost leads to places I would never have seen otherwise. Travel certainly was different just thirty years ago.
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This is a really good idea. I have used old travel stories when I haven’t got any new material and it is great fun pouring over old photographs and postcards for clues to jog the memory – I have dragged up some stuff that I had forgotten about years ago. If I go back to a place I also like to make comparisons with places that I visited long ago – that can be fun.
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Thanks Andrew! I love your stories old and new!
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I am looking forward to your memory stories!
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