Wanderlust

Every time we take a drive out to Neepawa, where some of my family still lives, I get a serious case of travel fever, or wanderlust.  Wanderlust is derived from the German “wandern,” to wander and “lust,” or desire.  And that describes exactly what I experience every time we head west, a great desire to keep driving and go exploring in new, far-away parts of the country.

I put the blame (or credit!) for my travel fever squarely on my parents, not because they’re German, but because they took me and my siblings on many a road trip when we were younger and instilled in us a love for travel and for exploring our country.  I don’t think that German people have any more or less wanderlust than anyone else, but I do have to acknowledge my parents’ adventuresome spirit, which brought them all the way to Manitoba from their hometown in Germany shortly after they were married.

You might think that, having journeyed such a far distance from their native land and their families, they would have been content to stay at home and let travel become a faint memory, but not my parents.  Many of my fondest childhood memories center around summer road trips, first in the blue Ford Fairlane Station Wagon and then in the huge, elegantly wood-panelled Country Squire, that for many years carried all eight of us comfortably with room to spare for our luggage.  From my customary position behind Mom in the passenger seat, I could often keep a watchful eye on the side mirror-view of our tent trailer.

This is the closest model I could find of what that old Country Squire looked like.

We explored northern Manitoba, western Ontario, and points west as far as Victoria in the care-free summers before some of us older children were tied down with part-time jobs.  Wintertime dinner table conversations often centered around possible destinations for the next vacation period or memories of the terrain, the campsites, or the wildlife we had encountered on previous trips. 

As an adult now, I understand that part of my intellectual inheritance from my parents is the curiousity that makes me long to see new places and to explore every country road I encounter.  When my husband and I travel, even on short day-trips, I keep a watch for interesting looking country roads and I’m consumed with wanting to know where they lead and what might be seen on the way to that final destination.

 It was that curiousity and that wanderlust that led to us living here in our country home.  We had been out for one of our customary drives one summer day almost seven years ago, when the idea of moving out of town had not even occurred to us yet, and on the homeward stretch I suggested we explore a village we had passed through many a time.  I was intrigued to see the parts of the community we couldn’t see from the highway. 

So, we turned off the main road and eventually found ourselves on a sandy road that meandered and turned through village, forest, and marsh.  A final turn brought us to a dead-end road with only three homes set into shade-dappled clearings between huge pines.  We even looked at the house and yard in which we now live and admired its location, little dreaming that we would live there one day.   So, it’s thanks to my inherited curiousity and wanderlust that we now regularly drive our own country mile to arrive at the best of all destinations … home.