In New York, realizing that travel is a lifelong pursuit

The first time I took a trip to New York City was in 1980. I meant simply to look for the legendary 1920s Algonquin Round Table, to check if a community still existed, before moving on to another destination.

The daily luncheon comprising the city’s literary luminaries at the historic Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan was no longer around.

But I ended up staying in New York for three years, during which I managed to get a job, get married and get pregnant – all in that order.

On my next trip to the Big Apple, I returned with my two children.

Our borrowed Midtown Manhattan apartment came equipped with a simple TiVo subscription – this was back when Netflix was not even a speck in the tech horizon – and was located at a walkable distance from first-rate bookstores, cafés, parks, theaters and sundry tourist haunts.

It turned out to be what we unanimously remember as “the best vacation ever”, mostly because we had no itinerary or timetable. This allowed us to joyfully spend as much time as we could with each other.

In 2016, after retiring from my newspaper job, I made a celebratory trip to NYC and had the chance to have dinner with a wonderful couple I rarely saw back home in the Philippines.

Travel is a lifelong pursuit, one that is often filled with significant milestones

Riding the subway led me to our appointed restaurant without a snag and the experience again convinced me that my country was in dire need of a reliable mass transport system, one that could smoothly take visitors around town.

When I was young, I never understood why elderly folk still traveled, albeit in groups. Now I know better: Travel is a lifelong pursuit, one that is often filled with significant milestones.

The world is full of experiences that deserve to be stamped on our passport at least once. After all, if we are easy to please, we can visit all sorts of bypaths for a bargain. The cheapest fare and barest of accommodations can reward us with a kind of happiness that cannot be purchased.

And so we travel. For work or pleasure or both, out of curiosity or boredom, for a change of scenery or a yearning for the familiar — so many personal reasons inspired by a basic human instinct to either lose or find ourselves in the adventure.

There’s no age limit, no prescribed frequency, and no destination too far-flung for the resolute traveler. I could be bound to a wheelchair someday but if you waved a plane ticket to New York at me, I’d book the next flight out in a heartbeat.