Family business

My mom is a pretty cool cat. A good few of you reading this blog probably know her, and know this. If you've been around long enough to remember how so many of us spent plenty of time under her roof during our younger years, you'll know how happy she was to provide a safe space for so many young people to do what they needed to - both profound and idiotic. It's one of the many parts of my upbringing that I'd like to repeat for my kids.

But I'm not here to wax rhapsodic about the days when we all were in and out of the Broadleaf Place door. This post has to do with another reason for my mother's coolness: the gleam that she gets in her eye whenever she thinks of heading off somewhere interesting.

The travel bug either hits us, or it doesn't. I suppose it was possible that I could have grown up and loathed hitting the road, but it would have been damn hard. From an early age, we were tacking family holidays onto her conferences (she's a professor). My earliest clear memories are all from these trips, and those did a good job in getting me on the travel train.

That train really got rolling in my eighth-grade year. Grade eight sucked. I suppose it does for many of us, but I was having one hell of a time as a socially awkward kid whose time was completely wasted by the curriculum. Other than the one day a week that I attended an enrichment program (where many of my closest friends and I met), weekdays weren't exactly a happy time. My parents' solution? To pop me out of school for almost 2 months so that Mom and I could backpack across Europe together. My teachers readily agreed that I'd learn a heck of a lot more that way (ah, the joy of the Individual Education Plan), and we were off. Those weeks of mad dashing on trains and bunking in hostels clearly cast the die for my travel obsession, and I was glad of it.

The trend kept up through high school. We wandered off to England and Poland, and backpacked around the Nordic countries after I'd finished my first solo trip to Southeast Asia. Once university started, I saw less and less of my mother (especially after I moved out), and so our shared reading weeks became the time when we could catch up on months of conversation. By then, I'd had a year on the road myself, making me a pretty expert travel planner. The model emerged quickly: I would plan the trip, make all the arrangements, and lug the bags a bit. She would pay. This got me, a starving student, to Peru, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Iceland, and Eastern Canada.

Not all families travel together well. It's very easy for tastes to differ, but luckily my mother and I are much of the same mind. Neither of us need much in the way of creature comforts, and prefer staying in locally run places. This means hostels in rich countries, or cheap-and-characterful old hotels in poor ones. Works like a charm. As I get older, our tastes also dovetail better and better. Once upon a time, sitting for a morning drinking espresso and people-watching would have been pulling teeth for me, now I can think of few things I'd rather do.

My mom's also a tough cookie. Whether it's trucking it up the paths of Macchu Picchu or holding on to the side of a sailboat chasing whales through the waves, she's often happy for an adventure or two. She's had a lot of pretty tough times in the past years, so it always makes me smile when we hit the road and she realizes just how much strength she's got in her. We make allowances, of course, for the fact that mom's not 20 anymore. We don't pack as much into a day as I might on my own, generally - but to be honest, I don't mind that in the slightest. I've known many younger people who would run in fear from the sort of travel experiences my mom takes in stride.

So, I'm pretty excited for the next stage in Josh n' Mom adventures. On February 4th, about 10 days after Lauren flies home from Bamako, I'll be off to another airport. This time, I'll be picking my mom up in Niamey, the capital of Niger, where we'll spend 3 weeks wandering.

Why Niger, you ask? Admittedly, the place gets bad press. All you really hear about are floods, or political turmoil, or kidnapped diplomats. What a shame this is! Niger is home to some of the most spectacular desert in the Sahara, the ancient trading cities of Zinder and Agadez, one of West Africa's only good parks for proper safari-ing, and tons of riverside market towns to check out. From a practical point of view, it works out wonderfully. Visiting the park and the desert is outside my means as an independent traveler, but with the two of us together, we can afford it. Nowhere else could I introduce my mother to so many of my travel joys at once - Islamic culture and architecture, wildlife, the desert, and the joy of sitting around in little bench cafes, babbling cheerfully in French (which my mother speaks even better than me, courtesy of long practice and a year in Paris).

It won't be all roses, of course. Niger is the poorest place on Earth by most measures, and it'll certainly be at times shocking. The safety situation has calmed down since the Tuareg rebellion in 2007-8, but the government right now maintains some pretty tight restrictions on desert travel (largely as a convenient way of clamping down on political dissent) , which means we'll have a backup plan of crossing into Mali and hitting the sand from there. I'm keeping my ear to the ground, of course, but I'm also super-proud that my mother is happy to distrust paranoid foreign ministry warnings and join me in the middle of Africa. I know she'll love it, and it'll be great to see her. We're still a family, which means at least one good tiff is inevitable, but I'll be happy to soothe it with mint tea and the Niger riverside.

It'll be grand!
Peace