I was sixty-two years old the first time I left the United States.
I want to sit with that for a moment, because it sounds like a confession, and maybe it is. I had never been to New York. Never been to Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles. I was a man who had built a career, raised a family, served his city — and I had done all of it within the comfortable gravity of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Europe was something I read about, dreamed about, and, once, almost reached.
I was eighteen when I made my first attempt. A friend whose father had military connections in Germany had invited me to spend the summer after my senior year there. I spent months preparing — studying a German Made Simple book, drilling vocabulary and phrases, determined not to embarrass myself. And then, the way things sometimes go when you’re eighteen and the world has other plans, it fell apart. I don’t remember the exact reason anymore. I remember the disappointment. I remember putting the book away.
Forty-five years is a long time to carry a detour.
Bonnie and I had dreamed for years of going to Europe to trace our ancestral heritage — small villages in Scotland and Ireland, the places our families came from. There were moments when the money was there. But there was always something else competing for it, something that felt more urgent or more practical, and the trip kept getting rescheduled to a future that stayed just out of reach. And so we waited.
Then, in 2007, Bonnie’s work in youth ministry at Cascia Hall Preparatory School brought an unexpected gift. She was invited to attend the Youth Animators Congress in Rome — an international gathering of Augustinian youth ministers from around the world. She would travel with a group from Cascia. I was welcome to join her, on my own dime.
A European vacation for two, for the price of one. We jumped.
I arrived in Rome in the middle of summer, hot and exhausted from the flight, dragging my bags through the bus terminal toward the hotel. I had read about the truffatori — the scammers who work the terminals, posing as helpful porters, aggressive and practiced. Rick Steves had warned me about them. I thought I was prepared.
I was not prepared.
The man who grabbed my bags would not let go. He was insistent, cheerful, immovable — a professional. I had to literally yell at him, in the middle of the terminal, jet-lagged and overheated, to get him to back off. He released my bags with great theatrical offense, shrugging at the crowd around him: Oh my Goda, I can’ta believe eh, you’re so crazy — I’ma just trying to help you.
Bonnie and I have been doing that impression for nearly twenty years. It comes out whenever someone is being particularly indignant about something. It is one of the great souvenirs of the trip.
I checked into the hotel. I went to bed. I slept until dinner.
That first evening, a small group of us found a sidewalk cafe a few blocks from the hotel. Six or eight people, a bottle of wine, a plate of pasta, the sounds of Rome moving around us in the summer heat. I remember sitting there, looking at the street, and feeling something I can only describe as overwhelmed gratitude. I had never been anywhere internationally. And here I was, in the middle of Rome, Italy, eating dinner like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Wow. That was the whole thought. Just: wow.
A few days later came an evening I will carry for the rest of my life — hundreds of people from every continent, eating and laughing and singing in many languages at once.
A few days later came an evening I will carry for the rest of my life. The congress was ending, and the celebration happened on the lawn of the Augustinianum — a gathering place that sits directly alongside the eastern colonnade of St. Peter’s Square, virtually at the literal threshold of the Vatican. Hundreds of people from every continent, eating and laughing and singing in many languages at once. I thought about that eighteen-year-old with his German Made Simple book, the summer that never happened, the forty-five years of detours. And I thought:
here. This is where the road was always going.
After the congress ended, Bonnie and I traveled — Rome, Florence, Milan, and the smaller villages in between. What I wasn’t prepared for, beyond the beauty of it, was how profoundly the rhythm of Italian life would get under my skin. Dense, walkable neighborhoods where almost no one had a car. People moving on foot, using public transit, living close to everything. A way of organizing a life that I had never considered and couldn’t stop thinking about.
And then the ending we hadn’t planned for, the one I will never forget: three days and nights at a hotel on Lake Como.
If you have never seen photographs of Lake Como, I will tell you simply that it is considered one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and the photographs do not lie. What I cannot tell you is how it feels to sit at the edge of that water, surrounded by mountains and light, and realize that you are actually there — not dreaming it, not reading about it, not watching someone else’s travel footage — but there, in a place you never genuinely expected to see in this lifetime. It was magical. That word gets overused, and I am using it anyway, because nothing else fits.
Three years later, Bonnie and I sold our midtown single-family home and moved into a high-rise condominium in downtown Tulsa.
I tell people it was a practical decision — lock-and-leave convenience, walkability, being closer to the action. All of that is true. But the real reason, the reason underneath the practical reasons, is that we sat on a sidewalk in Italy and saw a different way to live. And we couldn’t unsee it.
That is what travel does, when it does its best work. It doesn’t just show you new places. It shows you new possibilities for your own life, possibilities you couldn’t have imagined from inside the life you were already living.
That is what travel does, when it does its best work. It doesn’t just show you new places. It shows you new possibilities for your own life.
In 2010, we went to England — another Augustinian gathering, another vacation for two at the price of one. I expected it to pale beside Italy. It didn’t. It was equally rewarding in almost every way, and that is a story worth its own telling.
Scotland and Ireland are still on the list. The small villages, the ancestral heritage, the places our families came from. We haven’t made it yet. The honest reason is money — the platform you’re reading right now is still finding its footing, and a transatlantic trip requires a kind of financial confidence we haven’t quite assembled.
But we will get there. I have learned, across these years, that the trips that matter most are the ones that keep getting rescheduled — right up until the day they don’t.
