February 2010
I just came back from a whirlwind tour of Europe, as we hosted our Martin Luther King Global Conference weekend around the world. I was crazy and lucky enough to have traveled to three events, and I got to spend two full days in Dublin’s fair city. It is always fun and fab to meet with our wonderful and dedicated group leaders who inspire and continue to believe that travel is transformative and that travel changes lives.
We had fun—I even got to sing a song with Kieran Scanlon, a teacher and tour manager who is a native of Dublin. We belted out two verses of “The Auld Triangle,” a poignant Irish song about English exploitation and colonialism. It felt quite odd to be singing that, being English, but I think I held the notes half-decently, and Kieran was semi-respectful of a working-class boy from Lambeth in London singing along with him.
In Madrid, we spent time in aprons at a cooking school, and then wine pressing with fake grapes tied into what seemed to be a Wii machine, and there was a fabulous flamenco workshop to end the weekend.
After a day spent at the airport in Madrid because of fog and cancelled flights, I eventually found one flight that got me into Rome for the sensational farewell dinner that traditionally ends the weekend there. It’s a funny thing, getting stuck at an airport, especially in Madrid which has two terminals. One reminds you of a super modern metropolis with sweeping architecture, wonderful shops and cafés, and light that streams in through the glass windows everywhere, and the other is a dark and dingy terminal building that has no light, no facilities, where you quite expect to be boarding a propeller plane when you walk through the departure lounge. As I dodged between cancelled and delayed flights, I grew quite fond of the transit bus and more importantly, quite relieved that I absolutely never check baggage when I travel.
So at the end of an exhausting day, the arrival in Rome was, as always, sublime. You get the sense of Rome as you drive past Saint Paul Outside the Walls, the first hint at what’s to come. Then, as you sail by the pyramid and protestant cemetery in Testaccio and head across the Aventine, you have this immediate sense that you are in a spectacular place. I have driven along the Circus Maximus a million times and always I just sit there and think...wow.
Rome unfolds so fast after that. Marcello amphitheatre, the Capitoline hill, Piazza Venezia, the Pantheon, the Forum, the Colosseum…the sights literally hit you every two seconds, and all you can think, again, is wow! The dinner in the palace that was Mussolini’s residence during his reign was magical, and it was a place I had never been to, just near the Porta Pia.
It’s always something, whenever you travel. The something you learn, the new place you go to, the something you do differently that makes those long journeys worthwhile and even makes up for getting stuck in an airport or spending too much time inside the cramped airplane space. That something is the wonder of travel.
I’m live on Twitter this month and I’m traveling a bit, so tune in and follow me. Thanks to you all for traveling with ACIS.
See you out there somewhere.
Peter Jones
President and Co-Founder, ACIS
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