We missed having our grandson around the Christmas tree this year.
He was in Germany visiting a friend whose father is stationed there for a few months with the military. His friend’s parents offered the invitation a few months ago and it was too good to pass up.
You get him here and we’ll take care of the rest, they generously offered.
So, on Dec. 21, our 19-year-old, college sophomore grandson left on a 22-hour trip from San Diego to Stuttgart.
I admit to being a little anxious about the two airline connections he’d have to make. The first was at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Our son, who was keeping his anxiety in check by closely monitoring the flight tracker app on his phone, informed us that the flight from Houston to Munich was boarding in another terminal just as the San Diego-to-Houston flight was pulling into the gate.
I held my breath and reminded myself that the process of boarding international flights took longer than domestic flights. Our grandson will make the connection, I assured myself. He did.
Then it was 10 hours to Munich, a three-hour layover, and a 45-minute flight to Stuttgart.
The next we heard from our grandson was a text in the middle of the (our) night. He was in the car with his friend’s family.
Exhale.
I envy my grandson’s youth and am thankful for his adventurous, inquisitive spirit. He has a love of learning, a prerequisite for a lifelong traveler. His European trip unearthed memories of my first solo sojourn — not as far-flung as Germany but of equal duration.
It was the summer of — well, let’s just say it was sometime during the last millennium. I was 16, had recently moved from Rochester, N.Y., to St. Louis, and I missed my friends. Intensely. I had saved my babysitting money from the previous school year and bought a ticket to from St. Louis to Rochester on a Greyhound bus. It could’ve been a Trailways. Either way, I don’t remember even considering the travel time — 22 hours — or the necessary transfer in the middle of the night in Chicago.
My parents didn’t blink when I announced my plans. At least they didn’t say anything. As the oldest of 11 siblings, I sometimes half-joke that my parents probably never noticed when I was gone. No helicopter parenting in this era.
It was 2 a.m. when my bus pulled into the massive, mostly underground, transportation hub in Chicago. This terminal in those years has been described as “a gritty, downtown nexus” where poverty and other troubling urban issues converged, but one thing it wasn’t was dark. Its maze of underground tunnels was flooded with that white, fluorescent glare. Despite the hour, hundreds of travelers scurried to make connections, including dozens of young men in military uniforms hauling heavy duffle bags.
There were newsstands, greasy-spoon diners and shops with racks of potato chips, beef jerky, chewing gum and cigarettes. No one asked permission or apologized for lighting up — anywhere, including on the bus.
I have no memory of finding my connection, but I do remember the driver telling me I was missing the part of the ticket I needed for the next leg of my trip.
I was not an assertive 16-year-old, but I was persistent and maybe I looked a bit pitiful. Whatever the reason, after much discussion, the driver posited that the driver on the first leg had ripped the wrong page from my multi-paged ticket. This second driver — a kind soul, to be sure — held the bus past departure time to “check with the office” to verify that I could ride the next leg of the trip.
Exhale.
The rest of the trip was not without incident, but no room here to talk about the 20-something, greasy guy who tried to persuade me for a couple of hundred miles to run away with him. For another time…
May 2026 bring you many happy adventures.
