Venimus, vidimus, . . .

My brother has been traveling more regularly around the country. Mostly these trips are within a few hours of his home, but a few take him a little further afield. And often they allow him to pop by our place for a night or two while he transits from one place to another. On one such meeting we found ourselves at a local bookstore. He was looking for a travel guide, and beside the titles he was investigating, I saw a book with a bright yellow cover and a catchy title—We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year—and an equally playful tagline: “Nine Months, Six Continents, Three Teenagers.”¹ That caught my attention. I enjoyed the play on the classic Latin “veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) that is attributed to Julius Caesar,² and it also resonated because our first exchange student was about to emabark on her gap year adventure down in South America. So I made note of it, so I could return to it later.

Fast forward to this week, and I have the copy in hand, fresh from the library. The text moves quickly, and the author is funny, though perhaps a little full of himself. The tone can sometimes feel awkward or forced or unfortunate, but with two older, obnoxious brothers, of the same generation as this fellow, I can see past that pretty easily. And it’s worth seeing past. Theis family is living, and the stories they collected here are highly interesting and motivating.

In the second chapter the author recounts a story from many years ago when he and his wife were traveling the world for the first time. They were in San Francisco and needing to get to Los Angeles for a flight. Hitchhiking that distance didn’t make sense given their limited amount of time, so they decided to hitch to the local bus station. A driver picks them up and asks where they’re headed. The indicate the bus station. But the driver wants to know where they really need to go. They say L.A. They have a flight to catch for the first leg of their tour. And their ride says he can take them there—five hours away! When they asked why he would be so generous with his time, he noted that the author, who at that time looked like a military man with his haircut, reminded him of the American GIs who had rescued him from a concentration camp. This way his way of repaying the debt of gratitude he had for the people of the country.

Holy hell.

So yeah, it’s interesting to me to read stories like that. Or just general travel advice like “don’t eat street food, don’t play with stray dogs, and don’t swim in fresh water,” which they are warned off of from the nurse administering their various vaccinations for travel.

More to come. I have to get back to reading.

Notes

• 1. Charles Wheelan, We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year (Norton, 2021).

• 2. Yes, if you’re wondering, I figured out the verbs and case of the original Latin and adjusted them from first person singular to first person plural, thus the title of this post can be read as: “We Came, We Saw, . . .”. I know, I know. It’s needless and obnoxious. I was just complaining about this sort of thing to Bryan mere moments ago. But once I started doing it there was no turning back. Mea Culpa.