The summer after my senior year, I traveled around Europe. I didn’t do it with my best friends or my boyfriend. I traveled through Europe with my mom, and I loved it. At this point you may be saying, “What a mommy’s girl!” and that’s OK. I would be lying if I told you that we never fought. I was an 18-year-old girl traveling across Europe where it is legal to drink, and where clubs and bars seem to be on every corner. The closeness at times made us want to kill each other or split up. However, that trek was the single most informative trip of my life. So here it goes: Why you should travel for a month with your mom.
1. You will be so grateful to have a person who can drive the rental car around Europe.
Even if you happen to be old enough to rent a car, you will be so glad that you do not have to drive said stick shift car through the Alps.
2. You will get to share memories that are unique to the two of you.
I will never forget when my mom let me run beside the car in Germany because I felt so awful after sitting in a car that I had to move around. The kindness that she extended to make me feel normal made such a difference in a foreign place. (Plus the pictures she took still make us laugh.)
3. If you are anything like me, you have a mother who is incredibly smart, so being able to learn with her was never really an experience I had before.
But when were in school together in Italy, I was able to learn with her and even help her.
4. You will get to go drinking with your mother.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do, which, in our case, meant drinking wine with every meal we had with our host family. This same principle extended to Ireland where we drank Guinness and I learned to bartend (she already knew). We even went on a literary pub crawl, complete with James Joyce stops and a lesson on Yeats. (I still have my pint cup from the Guinness factory, which she talked me into sneaking out of the brewery and finishing as we toured Dublin on a double-decker bus).
5. You will learn so much about your parent.
Most of the information I'm referring to here is not fit to print, but trust me when I say you won’t regret it.
6. Both you and your parent will realize that you are now an adult, and as such, things are about to change.
So, reevaluating the relationship may have to happen.
7. You might just get to connect with your family history.
On our trip, my mother and I traveled around the part of Ireland our family hails from. We were on a quest to find our relatives and visit the houses where my mom’s grandparents and great grandparents were raised. To our delight, we found that the homes of our dead relatives hadn't been torn down, so we saw five generations of Keane houses next to each other. This was my mother’s favorite part, as it was mine.
8. You will be surprised by the friends that you attract as a pair, and you will have the most incredible memories because of the things that you did together.
For some reason, people love to see a mother and daughter traveling together, and we attracted old couples, young singles, other mother-daughter pairs and just about every type of person you could think of. From this we gained new friends and memories from around the world that we will never forget.
9. You would never take half of the pictures that your parent forces you to take.
As a camera-averse person, I would only have captured a fraction of the moments that my mom did. Having her there helped me memorialize the trip.
10. Your parents most likely have more friends around the world than you do.
This comes in handy when you need a local’s advice on where to go in a country, a place to crash for a night, a translator or just a friendly face to welcome you when you are tired from traveling for over a month. These friends can also give you insight into who your parent was in her youth, which is something I think many of us don’t get to see too often.
11. As your parents get older, sometimes they need a break from each other too in order to have time to get fit, read a book alone or simply to watch a game without someone coming along and changing the channel.
Taking one parent allows them both to rediscover what each of them likes and to remember what they do for each other.
So while you may hope to go off this summer with friends, consider taking your parent because you never know what you might learn and it will certainly show them that you care.
