Travels with Mom

My mother was a junior high geography teacher who made sure her students knew the difference between an island and a peninsula, and that the Nile is the longest river on Earth. She loved old National Geographics, the sound of foreign languages, and maps. But most of all, she loved to travel--which is why she could barely wait for summer recess. Come June, she graded final exams, stocked the freezer with family dinners, and lit out to see the world on her own. One year it was every Christopher Wren church in London, another the Sahara Desert or the French Alps.

When I was growing up in suburban St. Louis, having a mother who traveled set me apart from my friends, and signified something I came to understand only recently, while talking to the writer Mary Morris, author of the novel “House Arrest” (Vintage, 1993). Her mother rarely went anywhere, but dreamed of doing so constantly. “The urge to travel,” Morris says, “is emblematic of women who are free.”

This would explain why my mother’s wanderlust had such an impact on me and why I so cherish the memory of our travels together. When I turned 15, I got to go with her to Japan, a trip she lovingly planned--beginning with my first plane ride and a bus tour up the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where we were to board a ship bound for Tokyo.

But a few days before our departure, she fell and broke her kneecap. We went anyway, shopped the Ginza, tasted sushi timorously and took the bullet train to Kyoto, where we stayed in a ryokan on the Street of the Teapot Menders. But what I remember most is my mom, soldiering on in a bright white cast.

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Thinking back, I realize that along with a thyroid deficiency and the shape of my face, I got my love of travel--which is worth any amount of trouble, as the trip to Japan showed--from my mother.

Traveling with my mom taught me other things as well. Getting away can change you, if you let it, and seeing new places makes you richer if you try to find out what they mean. Because of her, my vacations are never vacant. Take last winter, when she turned 73 and we booked a week at a luxurious resort on the north coast of Jamaica, intending chiefly to drink planter’s punch and lie in the sun. But paradise bored us. So we rented a car and drove east to Firefly, Noel Coward’s hilltop estate overlooking Blue Harbor. There, we took in the smashing view and imagined the island as it had been 50 years ago, before the advent of theme parks and mini-malls.

My father taught me lessons, too, and would have made a fine companion in Jamaica or Japan. But there is something special about mother-daughter trips, as countless mothers and daughters have found.

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton took her daughter Chelsea to East Africa a year ago, resulting in public statements about the importance of education for girls--and private memories only they can know. Melissa Balmain tells of dog-sledding in Minnesota and sea kayaking in British Columbia with her mom in a new book called “Just Us: Adventures and Travels of a Mother and Daughter” (Faber and Faber). And Mary Morris got her infant daughter ready for a lifetime on the road by putting her to sleep in different beds around the house, and in the occasional drawer.

To find out what makes mother-daughter travel special, I talked to women colleagues and friends, and to my mom, of course. We were in the kitchen of my new apartment, unpacking boxes at the time. “It’s just more comfortable than traveling with a man,” she said. “When I went places with your dad, I had to cater to him and let him make all the major decisions. You and I could always compromise.” She paused to unwrap a big ceramic bowl I bought at a pottery outlet in rural Ohio 15 years ago. “Remember where we got this? Remember the way we drove all those little back roads on our way home from Cape Cod that year? Your father would never put up with it.”

A professional colleague tells a similar story about lollygagging up the California coast with her mother, stopping at every little town and fruit stand that appealed--for her, a deliciously guilty pleasure completely unlike the way her family traveled when her destination-driven father was behind the wheel.

Francesca Taylor, a Santa Monica obstetrician who took her mom to the family homeland in southern Italy two times, says that she and her mother simply make excellent travel companions. “We’re temperamentally suited. We want to eat at the same time and have the same tolerance for long train rides.” And a friend of mine in New York says she’d rather travel with her mother than with her boyfriend, who scrimps too much, isn’t all that adventurous and doesn’t like to talk to people. I understood that, because I tend to keep to myself too. But my gabby mom makes friends wherever she goes, forcing me out of my shell.

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The more I talked to women, the more I heard about the benefits of mother-daughter travel, not the least of which are practical. For instance, in countries such as India and Mexico, where women alone are often hassled, men on the make tend to leave you alone if you’re traveling with your mother or daughter because they see you in a familial context and understand that your motive is sightseeing, not sex.

Conversely, local women in countries such as these who normally avoid strangers tend to open up, particularly to mothers with young daughters. And even in Europe the mother-daughter configuration can break the ice. Fontaine Syer, the artistic director of the Delaware Theatre Co., found frosty Parisian hotel keepers uncharacteristically helpful because she was traveling with her elderly mother, whom they deferentially referred to as “Madame votre mere.”

Admittedly, lots of women would gag at the thought of a trip such as Fontaine’s. The mother-daughter relationship is heavy baggage to take on a trip, and many travel together only by default, when they can’t get a husband or boyfriend to go along. A woman I know says that traveling with her mother makes her feel like an old maid, and another can’t shake a sense of guilt because her mom insists on paying the bills.

Nor are mother-daughter trips blissfully free of battles for control, especially as one grows up and the other grows old. In Paris--and later in Ireland--Fontaine recalls coming to difficult crossroads along the way where she had to remind herself that she was taking the trip for her mother primarily. This meant she had to let her mom decide what to see and do. And even author Balmain, who’s made a joyful habit of venturing into the wild with her mom, says that the two of them “will never share a kayak again.”

Regardless of the drawbacks, though, plenty of mothers and daughters are finding good reason to travel a deux, simply because they want to share a place they enjoy with close kin. Claire Kaganoff, a rabbi’s wife from Chicago, goes to Las Vegas every fall with her grown daughter, Aleta. They play the slots, stroll up the Strip and picnic in palatial hotel rooms on kosher food brought from home.

To others, trips are mutually pleasing gifts. Several months ago Lynne Wright of Phoenix treated her busy daughter, Penny Allen, to a week at Lake Austin Spa Resort in Texas for Penny’s 40th birthday, which kept Penny from dreading the day and gave her mom the joy of seeing Penny relax away from the pressures of family and job.

The occasion for mother-daughter trips may not always be joyful, though. After the death of her father, a friend of mine took her grieving mother back to the Wisconsin Dells, where the family had spent their summer vacations. It was a bittersweet trip to be sure, but one that helped them both face the loss and move on.

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Last year, Margaret Carroll, an art history professor at Wellesley College, made a weightier pilgrimage still--with her daughter to Prague, where her grandparents had made their home before they died at Auschwitz. Her mother, who survived the Holocaust, went along. “Prague is beautiful, so it was not a lugubrious visit,” Margaret says. “And my mother got a chance to show us how wonderful her childhood had been.”

Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you go, or why, so long as you get a chance to talk and leave familiar roles behind, seeing each other in changed ways and forging new emotional ties. Marybeth Bond, editor of the just-released “A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart” (Travelers’ Tales, Inc.), says that traveling with her daughters gives her the chance to communicate deeply and pass on values to them, particularly when they pipe up from the back seat of the car with questions such as, “What happens when you die?”

An expert on the subject of mother-daughter travel (this is her fourth book on the subject), she offers a few pieces of sound advice. For instance, if you’re planning a first trip with an elderly mother, start easy, choose a destination close to home and don’t stay away too long. If you are a professional woman and can swing it, take your daughter on a business trip to introduce her to your world. For women with several daughters, it’s a good idea to single each one out for a trip alone with mom occasionally, which comes as a real treat to a little girl and helps you both get reacquainted without the distractions of siblings and spouse.

Mary Morris says she won’t forget the way her daughter, then 11, asked to hold hands before diving into the blue Caribbean to snorkel among swarms of black and yellow fish.

And I can still see my mother hobbling up the flight of steps at the end of the Street of the Teapot Menders.

Maybe what makes mother-daughter trips special is, after all, just a matter of memories, the most precious and durable sorts of souvenirs. I once read that memories are hidden all around the world, waiting to be found. I found one in Venice five years ago. The day before I was scheduled to leave, I sprained my ankle in an exercise class. But I iced it, wrapped it and went. I zipped across the lagoon in a motoscafo, listened to a soprano in the cheap seats up by the ceiling in the great Baroque opera house La Fenice, ate delicate multilayered sandwiches at standup counters in cafes, and wandered through the city’s endless maze of streets. With a cane, of course. Like mom.

Here are a few possibilities for mother-daughter trips:

The Mills College Alumnae Assn., telephone (510) 430-2110, offers a variety of trips that are particularly well-suited to mother-daughter travel (Mills is a women’s college; you need not be an alumna to go on tours). Currently scheduled are tours to the Swiss Alps (May 31-June 8, $2,395 per person, including room, meals and air) and the Ashland (Ore.) Shakespeare Festival (Aug. 7-11, $740, not including air).

Esprit Travel, tel. (310) 829-6060 or (800) 377-7481, offers 12-day walking tours of Kyoto, Japan, in the spring and fall. Participants stay in a small Japanese-style inn and tour the city’s gardens, temples, noble villas and flea markets on foot and by public transport, covering three to five miles a day. The next departures are Oct. 5, 19 and 30. The price is $2,850 per person, including air, accommodations, some meals and tax.

Lake Austin Spa Resort, tel. (800) 847-5637, is offering three, four and seven-night mother-daughter packages through the end of the year. The package features a 50% reduction on the rate for mother or daughter, provided the two travel together and share a double room. Spa-Finders, tel. (800) 255-7727, can provide information on other spas with mother-daughter deals, including the Oaks at Ojai, the Golden Door in San Diego and the Palms in Palm Springs.

CIT Tours has a new program called Progetto Ritorno that helps travelers plan trips to track down their Italian roots. To get a brochure, call (310) 338-8615. Two good destinations for moms with young daughters are Canada’s Prince Edward Island, home of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote the “Anne of Green Gables” novels, and Burr Oak, Iowa, where Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House” series, spent part of her childhood. (There are Wilder homesteads to visit in Walnut Grove, Minn., and Mansfield, Mo.)