From the Editor’s Desk: Here and There (Premium)

After a 20-year break, my wife Stephanie and I visited Europe again in 2003, and we immediately fell in love. Again. But this time, we could do something about it, and so we booked a series of additional trips, always to Paris, with an eye on expanding the time we spent there each year. But we ran into a predictable set of complications related to cost and family before my wife discovered a solution that would let us be in Europe for weeks at a time without having to pay for a hotel: In 2007, we started doing annual summer home swaps in Europe, when the kids were 9 and 6 years old. And that first swap, a three-week stay in Paris, was so successful that my mind ran wild with the possibility of extending our stay each year until we were literally spending every summer abroad.

That never happened. During our second home swap, in 2008, and for four weeks, our daughter Kelly had a meltdown during a side trip visiting with friends in Toulouse after we had toured one too many cathedrals. After we calmed her down, she told us that she missed her friends and home and didn't want to be away for so long. And with that, the dream died: We continued our home swaps in Europe right until the 2020 pandemic, but we limited each trip to three weeks so that the kids could enjoy most of their summers homes with their friends.

This worked out well enough, and my wife and I continued to travel internationally, with and without the kids, at other times during each year. I can't explain our love of travel, and I've compared it to asking someone why they like chocolate, they just do. All I can say is that it was a driving force in our adult lives, and that being away---being there, as opposed to here---played a big role in how we see the world around us. We were as confused by our homebody relatives and friends as I know they were of us and our too-frequent trips.

"You're going away again?"

We were met with similar disbelief by some---not all---friends and family when we moved to Pennsylvania in 2017, as if leaving the Boston area was an unfathomable affront to their sensibilities. And while we tried to ameliorate hurt feelings by driving back home for long weeks as much as possible, at least quarterly before the pandemic, it's clear that's not good enough for some---back in January, I mentioned the guilt trips we still suffer---but we also have friends who visit us regularly in Pennsylvania, too, which is appreciated. And friends who have visited us when we're in Mexico now. We all have our own thresholds for change and acceptance of things that are different from our norm.

Anyway, we do have that itch, my wife and me. And it's a good thing it's both of us. I can only imagine how rocky things might be if only one of us was eager to pull the switch on traveling, or moving, or just mixing things up in general. That's all luck, as is our kids' acceptance of what sometimes feels like constant change. I mean, we did live in three different homes last ye...