I recently returned home from a five-day trip to Amsterdam with my husband. We went on a food tour that began with a breakfast of raw eel and herring with pickles and onions, took in a Banksy exhibit and perused the Rembrandt and Stedelijk museums. We walked an unfathomable number of miles, yanking each other out of the path of bike riders balancing everything from groceries to infants. We ate and drank our weight in cheese, apple fritters, things made with eggplant and wine. By day my husband snapped photos, and by night he posted them to Facebook, in part for the benefit of my mother, who likes to know where I am at all times.
“You looked like you were having a wonderful time,” she said when I returned.
Somewhere inside me, a tiny human began to weep.
Travel, for reasons no more interesting than that I’m the kind of person who gets homesick on trips to the local grocery store, is a challenge for me.
“I tried to be a good sport,” I told my mother. It was the least I could do for my husband. He’d made every effort to make my experience bearable, all the way from sitting in the middle seat on the airplane so I wouldn’t risk rubbing sleeves with a stranger, to allowing me to dictate where we stayed (a city apartment instead of a potentially chilly but infinitely more interesting canal houseboat).