Is the desire to travel genetic?

On the eve of our departure for Ecuador, my new colleague and friend, Jill, gave me a copy of the current National Geographic Traveler magazine (along with a copy of the recent edition of the Harvard Business Review – she figured me out quickly!). As I perused the magazine on the plane, one blurb caught my attention - that there is a new movement suggesting that a gene is at the root of the desire for human travel. From humanity’s origins in Africa thousands of years ago, we branched out and explored the world; later, the galaxy. And just a few months ago, the reach of human exploration left the boundaries of the Milky Way.

It is simple to think about such things in a macro way, but the thought really hit home with me. I have been pondering how this trip will affect my young sons. Will they, too, have a desire to explore and see the world beyond their front door? The desire to leave their comfort zone and find new and exciting, sometimes scary and downright awful, places they’ve never seen? 

As I write this essay, sitting on my couch in Ecuador, my parents are biking through Albania. My mom and dad have been in who-knows-how-many countries around this amazing planet, meeting locals, biking, dining, bungee jumping and whatever else, pushing their own limits. My sister, Katie, chose a career that satisfied her professional desire to work in the world of government policy…but within that world chose a division (Trade) that sent her to South America, Europe and beyond. While in college, when time was abundant, my brother and his buddies would just hop in their car and drive somewhere – anywhere – it didn’t matter to them, they just wanted to see something new.

My father’s parents, John and Rosemary, didn’t have the wherewithal to see the planet, but instead visited the great North American continent. In John’s lifetime, they visited all 50 states in the union, driving to the 49 they could, and saw much of Canada and a bit of Mexico as well. In my childhood, I have memories of them disappearing for months or even a year at a time, heading west with their travel camper on their truck, getting post cards from Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, you-name-it.

I don’t know much about John’s extended family, but on Rosemary’s side, the same continues. Her sister is a nun in Finland. Her nephew, David, has lived in several places in Africa, and when David got married in Kenya, Rosemary – well into her seventies at the time – jumped at the chance to experience a tribal wedding there, and later visited David in Ethiopia.

On my mom’s side, the travel bug isn’t quite as evident – they didn’t have much in the early days, and with a large Catholic family, travel was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Still, my grandpa Harry drove a Greyhound bus and a truck at various points in his career. It could be argued, I suppose, that he just took whatever work he could get - but still, you don’t continue to drive a bus or a truck around the country unless you have that restless gene in your body.

Shannon doesn’t have quite the same background, but there is a clear family history of travel. Her parents have never had a great desire to travel, while her Aunt Marge goes on three or four extraordinary journeys around the world a year, be it Norway, Russia, the wine country of France – and all four of her grandparents immigrated to the United States. Immigration in those cases was greatly driven by necessity – but that can’t be all of it. Not everyone left Ireland, Italy, Germany or wherever – no matter how bad it got. Is there something more, then, that helps push the desperate to a strange new place? Shannon’s grandma, Angie, was led by her parents on one of the most amazing trips I have personally been touched by. When the Soviets invaded her native Poland during the War, Angie and her family were sent to a collective farm in Siberia. Angie’s mom and dad came to a decision that they could not stay, and left. They made a trek of the ages, south from Siberia all the way to India, catching a boat to Australia, and later a refugee boat to San Diego. It was a trip full of peril, and Angie lost her dad on the trip. This was clearly a trip borne of necessity, but you don’t hear a lot of those tales. Surely there was something else there in Angie’s parents, something that pushed them to make such an arduous trip, right?

Three generations later, Shannon and I can count our lucky stars that our desire to travel is not borne from necessity, but merely from the desire to experience the rush of seeing a beautiful new place, the satisfaction at successfully navigating our way through a foreign place where we don’t speak the language, and the joy at making new friends halfway around the world. I guess, then, in addition to the thanks we give our parents at providing a great upbringing, we must also give homage to our ancestors and the travel gene that passed from generation to generation.

And so we will watch our sons and wonder if they, too, share this gene…and where it may lead them.