First Person: Family Travel

Through their journeys, grandparents inspire a love of wandering that weaves through generations.
Lauren Clem,
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The author’s grandparents in Egypt.

There is a photo of my grandparents in Egypt, the pyramids casting shadows in the late afternoon sun. My Mémère, in dark slacks and her signature blonde perm, smiles brightly at the center, while my Pépère sports the white sneakers and button-down shirt of an American tourist. The Great Sphinx looms behind them, the only other face in a landscape dominated by giants. If not for the surroundings, they could be dressed for church, another elderly couple trying to make the early bird dinner special.

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The author’s grandparents, Marcel
and Georgette Duguay, in Alaska.

For years, this photo greeted me at eye level upon entering my grandparents’ house. I’d walk the steep hill to their home after school and set up at the kitchen table for a snack of graham crackers and milk. My Mémère, like many ladies of her generation, insisted on a white lacy tablecloth, so we positioned souvenir placemats to protect it from the after-school spread. We scattered crumbs across places they’d visited on their travels — Alaska, Gibraltar, England, Niagara Falls, Salt Lake City and (my favorite, as a child) Disney World.

I never found it strange that my grandparents, who lived most of their lives within a couple miles of the Woonsocket triple-deckers where they grew up, should see the world. After all, my parents inherited their love of travel, and I experienced my first transatlantic flight at nine years old. It wasn’t until my Mémère’s passing last year — and the subsequent sorting through a lifetime’s accumulated stuff — that I realized the rarity of their experience. Photo albums, neatly labeled with the contents, blended family memories with travels that would seem extraordinary even to someone of much greater means. Pictures from Venice and the Azores intersperse with children’s birthday parties and baptisms. My cousins’ weddings share space with road trips to Canada or the Grand Canyon. New Zealand, Fiji, Bangkok, Norway, Iceland, Chile, Israel, Antarctica, Hong Kong — the destinations stretch back decades and unfurl in colorful travel brochures from long-gone tour companies, accompanied by notes in my Mémère’s neat handwriting on itineraries and hotels.

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The author’s grandparents in South Africa.

It wasn’t only in albums that the memories lived. In the newspaper rack beside my Pépère’s chair, Woonsocket Calls and crossword puzzles accumulated next to copies of National Geographic that I spent hours poring over on the carpet. A painted ostrich egg from South Africa sat alongside family photos in the living room, while miniature plush koalas from Australia clung to the bannisters between the shelves. Devout Catholics, my grandparents filled their walls with religious images and journeyed to pilgrimage sites in Israel and Europe. It seemed only natural that there should be a photo of my Mémère kissing Pope John Paul II’s ring during a lucky encounter on a trip to Rome. (I later learned most Catholics do not, in fact, have a photo of their grandmother with a saint.)

Marcel and Georgette grew up working class in a time when women rarely finished high school and men enlisted before the ink dried on their diplomas. My Pépère, who attended Mount Saint Charles Academy, spoke wistfully of the hockey team he could never join owing to his after-school job supporting his family at a bakery. (He and the other “day students” skated through lunch, a pastime recounted in tales of heroic goals.) My Mémère dropped out of school to work, and they married young, moving to upstate New York where my Pépère was stationed with the United States Air Force. Photos from their honeymoon show them beaming at hotels in New York and Washington, D.C. — a big trip for two kids from a small city, and a taste of what was to come.

Later, they’d return to Woonsocket, where my Pépère built a swimming pool business and my Mémère had a successful career selling Stanley Home Products. My mom recalls trips to Florida crammed in the back of a station wagon with her siblings, but other than these and occasional jaunts around New England, they reserved most of their travel for middle age. It was then that their trips took a decidedly international turn — replacing Vermont and Lake George with Tahiti and Singapore. They even ventured to places I’d consider dangerous today. After years of corresponding by letters, my Mémère journeyed to Haiti in her 70s to meet a student she sponsored through a charity organization. In 1997, my Pépère was hospitalized for five days in Russia with a bad case of food poisoning, a frightening ordeal in a time before wireless internet and online translation services. An album from the trip features a hospital receipt and packet of pills obtained from their cruise ship’s doctor.

Through all their travels, they recreated the sense of community they’d grown up with in Woonsocket. They made friends across the world and kept in touch, returning repeatedly to the same motels and using prepaid phone cards to maintain international connections. Their thrift was legendary, and most fervently on display during the regular trips they took with each of their sixteen grandkids. A rite of passage in my family, the route saw them drive us in pairs up the coast of Maine and across to Nova Scotia. We still laugh about the time during my brother’s trip when my Mémère ordered hamburgers from a roadside McDonald’s and had them add their own cheese from a cooler to save a few cents.

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The author and her cousin, Patrick, in Nova Scotia during a trip with their grandparents.

A few years later, I experienced it on my own trip when my cousin and I spent most of the drive with our feet propped up on a week’s worth of provisions. I remember traveling across the gorgeous expanse of Nova Scotia, my grandparents saying their daily rosary up front while we munched happily on snacks in the backseat. My Mémère, the same person who bought her cereal at Price Rite and obtained her GED at fifty-eight, had visited all seven continents, a feat very few can claim.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that among my cousins, nearly all of us prioritize travel in our lives. From six-month road trips to semesters spent abroad, to honeymoons to Machu Picchu and Greece, their legacy lives on in our wanderings. I used to think travel was something that left you untethered, weightless and unrestricted in an otherwise cluttered world. Now I realize it’s the homecomings that give weight to the destinations, the birthdays and weddings and barbecues that create the lens through which we see the world.

I inherited a lot of things from my grandparents — a night owl’s tendencies, a passion for deal-hunting, the placemats in the cupboard above my fridge — but this is perhaps the best: knowing that my roots, far from tying me down, have enabled me to roam far beyond where I came from.

This past fall, I was in a Greek taverna on my honeymoon when I observed to my husband that my grandparents would love the place. The food was hearty, the wine cheap and plentiful, and family photos dotted the walls. The previous day, we’d traipsed through the Acropolis, a destination they’d visited years before. When someone dies, people often say the world seems smaller without them, as if something has contracted. But looking through my grandparents’ albums, the world feels bigger, if only because they placed it within our reach. My Mémère and Pépère instilled a love of travel that has lasted for generations, and for that I am eternally grateful. If I can travel half as well as them, I will have lived a good life. And that is something you can only learn at home.