Dear Auntie Mac,
We’re retiring this year and looking forward to traveling. We’ve only ever vacationed in New England. You seem so worldly. Do you have any advice on places older folks like us should travel to in the U. S. and abroad?
A Fan

My Dear Neighbor:
Your letter has reminded Auntie Mac to solidify her own travel plans for the upcoming season, as certain amenities, reservations, and luxuries do not avail themselves readily to the tardy explorer. Still, while she would dearly love to recommend places, landmarks, antiquities and events that delight her, she realizes that people’s ideas of what constitute an enjoyable vacation vary as greatly as pebbles on the Plage de Matira. My dear late husband, who acted as, let us say, a governmental attaché for many of our foreign friends, was called to a number of exotic locations and, as was expected of someone in his position, his dutiful wife accompanied him, often to her great delight but sometimes to her abject horror (the tomato-throwing festival of Buñol, Spain, for example, still lives on in tormented memory).

Selfishly offered advice, however, based on personal preferences and paying little heed to cost, would include urging you to by all means visit the new Egyptology museum in Cairo as part of a trip to the pyramids and Luxor; or spend a week in Firenze, concentrating on the Ufizzi Gallery. And no lifetime is complete without a visit to Paris and the Tuileries gardens. As you see, dear, any recommendation is tainted by the recommender, and really, the choice must be yours. (For example, I solicited Lars’ opinion on favorite travel destinations, and with a look that implied that it was incomprehensible that I need ask, replied, “Fly-fishing the Anvik River in Alaska, of course.”) Depending on your budget, your fitness level, your desire for non-stop exertion or languid lolling (Auntie Mac’s current preferred travel activity), the choices are endless.

She will go out on a bit of a limb, however, and make this actual and heartfelt recommendation: since you have never travelled outside New England, why not see some more of this country first, just to get your voyaging feet wet, as it were. And we do live in a beautiful and fascinating country. For this, she recommends, as a first toe-in-the-vacation-pool excursion…a visit to Gettysburg. It is a highly emotional, sobering, and meaningful experience and she has not encountered anyone who has returned from it unchanged. The guides are wonderful, the nearby accommodations charming, and the history is palpable. If there are ghosts, they walk on this ground. By all means, pencil in Luxor on the Nile for the future, but take advantage of our common history, and humanity, first. Bon voyage!
Your Auntie Mac