My goals when I travel have changed as I have gotten older. I remember when I was growing up looking forward to when my Dad would come home from his temporary duty assignments overseas. He would bring me something and it would be fun.
A couple of times he didn't bring anything back and that was okay, but it was just weird because my mother made a big deal about it and everybody was, oh, what'd you get? And when I started going on trips myself, I would make a point of buying something for my mother and my father and bringing it back.
And I always bought a physical souvenir because that's what I was taught. You collect things and you get a physical souvenir and that's a sign that you went somewhere.
We have four children, and so whenever we would go on trips with our four children, we would come back with lots of little things because everybody got something to bring back. And we taught them what we were taught, that you bring a souvenir back to show your love to whoever didn't get to go and to your parents. We even would bring back gifts for other people. And that was fun for a long time.
But I've reached an age to where I don't want any more stuff like that. And I don't want to spend my time in gift shops every time I go on a trip. And I don't want to figure out a new place to put something that I just got on a trip.
I like to send postcards and for a long time that was a priority because the only place I could get them was in the gift shop. I had to remember to bring stamps. Otherwise I had to figure out how to buy stamps and send myself a postcard and send others a postcard while we were on the road so that they could participate and I could share with them the joy of what we were doing.
I was always so eager to share with my parents and family.
Now with modern technology I can take a picture on my phone and use an app called TouchNote to send postcards to anybody both nationally and internationally. Because it works on the internet I usually make a calendar reminder when we're on a trip to send a postcard every night around 9 p.m.
I send myself and my wife a postcard just so we can remember what we did that day and be able to share it with others or look at it and talk about it. At the end of the trip, I try to send a postcard to family and share with them the joy that we just experienced.
But I don't really buy things when I'm traveling. I don't want to have to carry them and I don't want to have to put them in my luggage and hope they don't break.
Funny how things change.
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