Planning the Trip of a Lifetime

Going to my Fathers Homeland

Photo by Jakub Kapusnak on Unsplash

When I turned forty-five, I watch an interview that discussed taking an extended vacation and being able to afford it. The interviewee was talking about a sabbatical from work for one year. Her main point was to plan for this, five years in advance. Some places of work will take 20% from your paycheck for four years and then pay out the following year from the accumulated funds. The focus was on university staff.

I worked for a university at the time but not in the same capacity as the subjects. However, I decided to implement her ideas on my own.

My father was born in Calabria in a small village in the mountainous region of southern Italy. I had never been there. My father had died some nine years before but I felt a need to visit his birthplace. I had been told that my looks were of a classic Calabrese woman.

Time

You need time to plan where and what it is you are going to do on your vacation. It is difficult to plan all that you want if you just pack up and go. There is a place for that type of holiday, but this was not it.

I used that five-year plan. You don’t need that long but my plan was to go to a foreign country where I did not know the…