by Mary Jo
Spending the first week of February in the Caribbean in the honorable pursuit of Vitamin D to tide us through the winter got me to thinking about vacations in general and the history of vacations in particular.
We had a lovely trip to Virgin Gorda--highs in the mid 80s, lows in the upper 70s, and the turquoise Caribbean rolling in about 20 feet away from our broad, covered patio--what's not to like? <g> And having a crowing rooster in the back of the very small plane that took us between San Juan, Puerto Rico and Virgin Gorda just added to the exotic fun.
From a historical perspective, it’s pretty amazing that we can climb on an airplane, fly a few hours, and vacation in a different climate and time zone. A journey across the Atlantic which once took months can be done overnight—for a long weekend getaway, if one wishes.
I think that the desire to see other places is innate, though some people feel it much more strongly than others. (Wave an airline ticket and my sister will follow anyone anywhere.)
People with a lot of money have always been able to travel, and one of the first great travel destinations was Egypt, with its incredible tombs, temples, and pyramids. Rich Greeks and Romans visited—and left their graffiti.
Side note: Graffiti are an inevitable consequence of travel. Napoleon’s soldiers left their share of marks on Egyptian monuments, and Byron famously carved his name on the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon in Sounion, Greece: http://ssad.bowdoin.edu:9780/snipsnap/eng242-s05/space/Temple+of+Poseidon
So rich people have always traveled, but from the wonderful Marcus Didius Falco mysteries by Lindsey Davis, I learned that middle-class Romans were travelers, too. In fact, they seeme to have invented the package tour. In the Roman empires, several critical factors allowed tourism to take root: Roman roads and the Pax Romana made travel relatively safe, and there were people with enough money and leisure to take advantage of that.
The Lindsey Davis book that tipped me off was See Delphi and Die, in which Falco, a tough, smart mouthed Roman informer that Sam Spade would recognize, goes off to Greece to investigate the murders of two Roman girls in Olympus. I strongly recommend the Falco novels—they’re smart and funny and reflect great research, and they take place all over the Roman empire. While I don’t advocate using another writer’s fiction as serious research, one can learn a lot about Rome and Roman society from reading Lindsey Davis. http://www.lindseydavis.co.uk/
Her discussion of Roman package tours got me to a’googling, and I found the delightful site of Tony Perrottet, whose book Route 66 A. D. chronicles his adventures in following the ancient Roman tourist routes with a backpack and his pregnant girlfriend. This link is to his home page, 
which describes the background of his book: http://www.tonyperrottet.com/paganholiday/index.php while this one is an excerpt from the book describing how Naples was the summer playground of rich Romans. http://www.tonyperrottet.com/paganholiday/excerpt.php (I think I'm going to have to buy the book.)
So this sort of thing had been going on for a long time.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, travel was no longer safe. People still traveled, of course, but they tended to have compelling reasons and armed guards. For an average man, the main ways to travel were to become a soldier (always a dicey proposition in terms of returning home), or to take a pilgrimage.
Pilgrimages flourished through out the middle ages, and continue today. They can take place for many reasons: religious devotion, the desire to pray for a child or a healing, to give thanks, to confess and seek redemption.
But having a good time and seeing a new place and meeting new people were surely part of the motive for many pilgrims The Canterbury Tales make it clear that it’s April and a jolly good time to ride out on a pilgrimage:
When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought to the root and all
And bathed every vein in liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower
………..
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage.
Margery Kempe was one of the most famous pilgrims, a middle class married woman and mother with a strong spiritual calling who made many pilgrimages, going as far afield as Rome, Jerusalem, and Spain. The Book of Margery Kempe tells of her spiritual ponderings and her journeys, and is sometimes considered the first autobiography in vernacular English. (It was apparently ghost written, but that's a mere detail.)
In the 18th century, the Grand Tour became popular for the sort of rich gentlemen we write about. They would visit the great capitals of Europe with tutors and servants and perhaps an artist who would draw the sites visited. (Holiday pictures were labor intensive in the days before cameras. <g>)
The great age of travel for the average person—people like us, in other words—came in the 19th century, with the invention of better roads, trains and steamships. The roads came first—in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle take her on a tour and that’s how she sees Darcy’s home, Pemberley.
But it was the trains that really opened the floodgates. Thomas Cook was a devout Baptist and temperance advocate who in 1841 got the idea of cutting a deal with a British railroad to transport a group of other temperance workers to a rally, taking them eleven miles for a shilling a head, which included transport and food. Not a bad deal.
His idea was successful, and soon he was organizing other tours within England, and then abroad, to the point where the phrase “a Cook’s tour” came into the language.
Within England, trains made it possible for the working class to take holidays, and like lemmings, they headed to the sea both for day trips and longer holidays. Seaside towns like Blackpool and Weston-super-Mare flourished. And if the water was cold and the beach made of shingle rather than sand—there were piers and amusements and new people to meet. It was a holiday and exciting--a journey the whole family could look 
forward to all year.
From there, it's been a steady progression to backpackers and Labor Day weekend traffic jams. I made the student grand tour of Europe myself after my sophomore year in college, traveling with a friend by bike and thumb and train over a good part of Europe. I'll never forget the excitement of landing at Heathrow for the first time and knowing that finally, finally I was in England. (I was apparently born an Anglophile. <g>)
So I like to think that we were following an old and honorable tradition by going to Virgin Gorda, where 
we could admire the other dramatic volcanic islands around the Sir Francis Drake Channel, and we contemplate cruising and diving pelicans. Of which there were many. (What is the collective noun--a passel of pelicans???)
A few years ago a friend of long standing called me because her high school senior daughter wanted to spend spring break in London with her boyfriend. My friend, a happy homebody, was not at all keen on the idea, and it’s to her credit that she called me for input, because she had to have known someone who has traveled as much as I have would say “Let them go!” Not only were both kids responsible young adults—as I pointed out, London was surely safer than Ft. Lauderdale during spring break. So her daughter and boyfriend went to London and had a wonderful time, and returned with a broader view of the world.
And that's why we take holidays, isn't it? To enjoy and learn and get a broader fiew of the world. So what great trips have you taken? And what journeys would you like to make? What’s on your personal list of “places to see before I die?” I’d love to hear!
Mary Jo, who loves to travel—and loves to come home again. (Author in the tropics on the left. And if you wonder why there is no detail--see my blog on introverts. <G>)