I blame my parents.

movieStar thought it would be a good idea to get the show on the road, and introduce her tiny version to the beach.

We picked the Algarve, a decent hotel with the amenities we believed would make our excursion easier (it worked) and off we went.

We needed a car for the ride, one that’s a bit more practical than our own, so we borrowed one from my parents. When I went to pick it up, my mom said I was the same exact age as tinyMovieStar when we went to Spain. Four months old, first trip.

I have a lot to be thankful, a LOT! Mom & Dad are amazing, and this is one of the things I’ll always be thankful for, and one I’ll try to pass along.

Every year, when summer came, they would get my brother and me into the car, and off we’d go. We traveled a lot in country, but I can still remember the trips abroad. Spain, Andorra, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, … heck, we went to Yugoslavia, that’s not even a thing anymore!

Always camping, traveling on country roads, pre-Air Con, pre-GPS, pre-entertainment systems. Two kids. How did they manage that ??

I was tasked with the navigation. Yes, at the time I actually thought I was. My love of maps started there. Holding a huge Europe atlas on my tiny lap, I would trace the route with my finger, memorizing the cities along the way. I would help pick the camping site, with another big book, looking for places with pools. That was our thing, pools. We were swimmers (there’s another post in there).

I learned how to ride a bike in a camping site in France, and ate delicious apples from an orchard in another one in Germany. We had yummy ice cream in Venice, and swam freely in the ocean in Nice. We visited castles that were nothing like the ones back home, and tried to decode signs in languages we would never speak.

I will never be able to thank them enough.

Every August was an adventure, and a big one at that. And it stuck! I found a job that would allow me to keep going to new places, and later on an amazing woman found me and helped keep that alive.

Hopefully tinyMovieStar will get that from us.

This is day 028 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. You can find out all about this project at 100daystooffload.com.