It's the Little Things

Traveling is all about the details.

I’ve traveled overseas three times, all three times to the British Isles: once when I was very small, once when I was just weeks shy of 21 and once this year. All three times, it has not been the majestic sites and sights that I remember most clearly.

People go places to see the big, the impressive, the glorious — but what’s interesting about traveling and memory is it’s not always the biggest and the best that catch your attention.

It is the small things. The little surprises, the unexpected familiarities, the sounds, the smells, the food, the way things are subtly different.

From my first trip, I remember watching “Casper the Ghost” in the rented house, the toast and jelly for breakfast, what felt like miles of gray cobblestones in London, the wind on my face and the rocking floor of the ferry, the gift shops after the castle tours.

And the one thing everyone who went on that first trip talks about is that, in front of Warburg Castle, I and two of my brothers played Ring Around the Rosy around a mud puddle. That’s right. The small puddle in the middle of the dirt path was more fascinating than the monumental castle a short distance away.

It turns out that kids can be impressed, but only momentarily. Then they just get overwhelmed and look for a game.

The same general principle held true when I went to England for a couple of weeks for a study-abroad class. We had a schedule filled with landmarks, with places of historical significance. We visited the carefully preserved homes (or similarly decorated houses) memorializing famous figures such as the Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, even G.F. Handel.

You know what I remember?

Meeting an friend and former classmate at Westminster Abbey while we were on separate study-abroad trips.

Eating lunch at a shockingly high-priced restaurant in Bath with Disney music played by a live pianist.

Getting lost and wandering the hills with a classmate on the way back to the hostel from dinner.

Finding a tree studded with coins while walking the Coffin Path in the Lakes District.

Taking a detour with a classmate and one of her friends to see rooftop gardens and ancient churches.

Eating a dinner entirely of strong goat cheese.

Taking a seven-mile hike over a rust-tinted river, through the heath, past lonely sheep perched on the edge of a cliff and up a winding dirt path to a derelict stone farmhouse.

Musing over the beautiful — and huge — painting of Lady Jane Grey.

Almost none of my strongest memories feature the things I expected to remember most.

You’d think that would change in the last four years as I grew up a little more, but nope. Even now, after recently returning home from Ireland, it’s the littlest things that made the biggest memories.

I remember my little brother climbing on rocks as much as the huge monuments we were standing by at the time. It is easier to imagine the huge Spire of Dublin, which our huge group encircled one drizzling night, than to remember the National Gallery. I enjoyed hearing Lady Dunsany ask about American politics or share her memories of meeting Donald Trump as much as or more than seeing the castle she lived in and the one we were traveling to that day.

Other small things caught the attention as well. For instance, the Irish evidently don’t care for ice water or cold tea (“Oh, you want ice water at McDonald’s? We’ll pour out hot water and put ice in it”) or even the Americanized mild mustard (Irish mustard is very strong and not well-suited to a mild sandwich). Also, having two national languages means every single sign is written in both English and Gaelic, and boundaries are a really big deal, so even the roads are practically crowded out by tall hedges bordering private property.

It was also fun to happen upon a plaque announcing W.B. Yeats lived in a little apartment overlooking the sea at Howth, and it was an even more delightful surprise to see that someone had built a diving board on a rock jutting from the sea there.

The fact that the small things can be the greatest memory-builders, though, does not make traveling any less valuable, but more valuable. We always have more to learn, and travel gives us just a brief taste of how much we don’t know about history, about places, about cultures, about languages, about values and, of course, about people.

At the same time, the small things remind us that we can always see the world in a new way. Through experiences like those in England and Ireland, I’ve learned it can be fascinating to wonder what it would be like to live there — or I can look at home in Evanston and try to see it as a tourist would.

It can be an amazing experience to step out of your shoes and into someone else’s just to get a taste both of how people are different — and, more importantly, how people are the same. Because no matter where we are in the world, briefly practicing being an outsider in some way (however we choose to do that, whether at home or abroad) can help us learn better what the truly valuable things in life are.

It’s the little things.