All my life, I have disagreed with Henry David Thoreau who thought it wasn’t “worthwhile to [travel] around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” The joy of travel has been in my blood since I was a child when our family summer vacation was a trip to visit our Canadian family. Our favorite stops included the gorges in Ithaca, the Thousand Islands, and Niagara Falls, especially when they were lit up with rainbow colors at night. Each of these places were natural works of art, although at the time I didn’t think of it that way. They were simply beautiful.
When I was older, I realized that Mark Twain, who said that travel was “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” was right. He also suggested that it “would be well if an excursion could be got up every year and the system regularly inaugurated.” I agreed wholeheartedly, so, in my early 20s, I took my first solo trip to Europe eager to explore the world.
I lived in New York City then, where my emerging interest in art was fueled by the amazing museums there. But it was the European museums that I visited where I marveled at paintings, sculptures and antiquities that I realized the gifts of art.