Mom-and-Me Travel

I love traveling solo through Europe. It’s a chance to meet new people and do things you wouldn’t normally try. Indeed, it’s how I met my rich and fabulous French former boyfriend. One weekend meandering the streets in Paris around the Louvre Museum got me two years with Claude M. Now I can brag about drinking fine wine, staying in five-star hotels, and squatting over toilet holes in rest stop bathrooms during wild drives down the French coast. So I wondered what would thirteen days traveling with my sixty-year old mother bring me? If not romance, then at least adventure.

When I told my friend Carla that my mother and I were taking a tour of Europe, I thought she would be emerald with envy. She gagged.

“Look, Venice is for lovers. I’d rather stay home with a TV dinner than go on holiday with my mother,” she said.

As a frequent single occupancy traveler, I couldn’t agree less. Venice is for everyone. But the idea of mommy-and-me travel seemed less attractive after Carla’s splash of British stiff upper lip reserve, tinged with the aroma of her Angolan scorn. Apparently every single woman about town with good sense knows that traveling with your mum is fodder for a Sunday night movie drama.

I hadn’t seen my mother in almost a year, so I had planned for us to be in Heaven on this trip. My nerves and my mother’s barrage of pre-travel questions and emails made me wonder if we were instead headed somewhere further south than that …

Would it be nine glorious days in Italy and another amazing four in Spain? Or was I headed for 312 hours in Reproach-burg, Disapproval-town, and Criticism-city? Convert those days into 18,720 minutes and only a Stephen King novel could interpret the horror of that holiday. “Why did you try to kill your mother?” my aunt would later ask.

In hindsight, I should have first developed a few key rules for traveling with a slow walking, opinionated, Bible toting, middle-class woman from the East Coast.