Travel, I know, is important. It broadens your perspectives. It encourages empathy and connections across cultures. It builds resilience and allows you to embrace the unexpected and the unfamiliar.
And yet, even knowing all of this, I am travel-averse, a combination of my inborn introverted, routine-oriented personality and my years of living in New Orleans and slowly determining that I am not really fit to live anywhere else. I generally enjoy traveling in retrospect, after I am home, when I am reflecting on the experience, but travel is often stressful and not particularly enjoyable for me in the moment.
We hadn’t taken a family vacation since pre-COVID, though, so for spring break, my daughters and I traveled to Seattle to visit one of my college friends and take several college tours. (Don’t ask me how we are already touring colleges when my eldest is clearly a tiny baby who was literally just born, but here we are.)
I loved Seattle. It was so beautiful – the water, the mountains, the cherry blossoms, the tulips! It was so clean – with trash cans and recycling bins on every corner (and not overflowing) and mandatory composting. It was full of delicious food and excellent coffee – we had pizza and fish and chips and Thai noodles and sushi and burgers and gelato and tacos and bagels, all of which were delicious. It was easy to navigate, with reliable and efficient public transportation that had clearly communicated routes and schedules.
And we did all the touristy things. My experience of growing up in a tourist city usually makes me reluctant to go all-in on the typical “must do” activities; I’ve been to New York City but not the Statue of Liberty, Chicago but not the Sears Tower, Los Angeles but not the Hollywood sign. I’ve had so many people drunkenly ask me how to get to Bourbon Street (usually while hopelessly lost and nowhere near the French Quarter), and I never want to be that clueless or that stereotypical. But in Seattle, with my kids in tow, I decided to get over myself and just embrace it, so we did Pike Place Market, Discovery Park, Alki Beach, and the first Starbucks. I even bit the bullet and did the Space Needle, where my kids leaned against the glass doing Instagram poses and I had to calm my nerves with a $20 cocktail called the Mai Tai in the Sky. And it was actually … really fun. All of it was really, really fun. I enjoyed my entire trip, with the exception of the red-eye flight that we took home, from 11:10 p.m. Pacific time to 5:40 a.m. Central time, where both of my kids slept fitfully on my lap/shoulders as I listened to true crime podcasts in the middle seat, my eyes bleary and sandy, my feet freezing.
My perspectives were definitely broadened by the trip. Seattle is, objectively speaking, a better city than New Orleans. It seems easier to live there. They don’t have frequent boil orders or get eight texts a week about neutral ground parking. Their homes are well-insulated (unlike ours) and not sinking into the swamp (like ours). Their public school system is excellent and easy to understand. They don’t have termite swarms or stinging caterpillars falling from trees.
But my ultimate perspective, which is that I don’t really want to live anywhere else, is unchanged. I need sunshine and mild winters. I prefer hurricanes to earthquakes. And the “Seattle Freeze” (the term my friends taught me for the standoffishness of locals) is really not my scene; I try to talk to absolutely everyone I meet, often with complete disregard for whether what I’m discussing is even appropriate for a wider audience. While I loved spending time with my friends, the only new friend I made in Seattle was a New Orleans native selling andouille from a food truck (he grew up in the Lower Nine and went to Sarah T. Reed; his daughter went to Ben Franklin around the same time I did).
As the plane touched down in the early morning hours and I stretched my legs and walked out into the blissfully humid spring morning, all I could think was, “There’s no place like home.”
For more Eve, check out her blog “Joie d’Eve” on Tuesday mornings at myneworleans.com
