Curiosity as Compass: A Gift from My Father
I lost my dad this year. Before he passed, I had the chance to have him read an earlier version of this post. Telling him how much he shaped me is one of the better things I've done. I think it was good for him, too, a reminder of the kind of influence he had, not just on me but on how I've built my entire adult life around curiosity, learning, and travel. He was my very first Travel Bug Tonic newsletter subscriber, and he opened every single email, read every single blog, and saved them all on his computer. Today would have been his birthday, so I'm sharing it here with his ok.
One of the things I like most about myself is thanks to my dad.
My love and longing to travel manifested early, and I can pinpoint the exact moment I felt the first spark of wanderlust ignite. I was turning 10 in 1980 when my family moved from the west coast of Canada to London, England for two years. At that fun age between childhood and puberty, I had packed clothes, stuffed animals and my first 45 record - Billy Joel's Still Rock and Roll. Our new, temporary home was in Saint John's Wood, a few blocks from Abbey Road, Lord's Cricket Ground and Regent's Park.
The moment my travel passion/obsession launched is a memory I've likely romanticized into something close to a divine moment. After bundling our luggage into the 1930’s cage-lift and riding it to the fourth floor of our London flat, I stood in the front hall of our new home, exhausted and jet-lag-zombie-like. My father had arrived weeks before we did, and I remember his joyful hugs when we arrived and his excitement about showing us around the neighbourhood. Rather than let us rest after the long, arduous journey, I watched my dad gather coats and umbrellas, urging us to head back outside to walk and stay awake.
That was the moment. It wasn't the airplane ride where, in those days, you wore your Sunday best and ate with proper cutlery. It wasn't hearing a British accent saying “You from Canad-er?” in response to the multiple Canadian flags sewn, taped and pinned all over our belongings. Nor was it my first taste of fish and chips wrapped in a grease-spotted newspaper, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. It was that moment of anticipation and pre-exploration as we prepared to leave the apartment with that feeling of stepping out into a misty new world that I instinctively knew was nothing like home.
Those two years in England shaped me more than I understood at the time. I remember one specific New Year's Eve, hanging out the window of Canada House in Trafalgar Square, watching the crowd, tasting my first champagne, part of somewhere enormous and far from home and completely thrilling. I was a kid. I didn't yet know that this was the beginning of a pattern, and I'd spend the rest of my life chasing that particular feeling.
Canada House 44 years later
I now understand this was simply my first step on a path my father had already been travelling. My dad, Commander Townsend, or more likely just Lew to you, chose a naval career that meant we moved constantly. Ottawa, Victoria, Toronto, Hawaii, Halifax, and England. Moving was simply what we did. In every new city, my brother and I would arrange furniture and search for the moving company stickers: green from Ottawa, brown from Victoria, red from Toronto, etc. I didn't question it until my late twenties, when I realized most people don't grow up expecting to leave everything familiar every couple of years. I think that being uprooted early and often is exactly where my comfort with unfamiliar places comes from. Home was never one fixed thing. It was more of our family unit, wherever we happened to be.
My Dad’s career took him to a couple of hard places that he didn't talk about easily. He served with the United Nations in Sarajevo during the war, and I remember him telling me, much later and only briefly, about his apartment. It was on what people called sniper alley, complete with a satellite dish outside his window, riddled with bullet holes. Years later we both read The Cellist of Sarajevo, and he told me that the book was very close to how he remembered that time.
His final posting took him to Cambodia, between Khmer Rouge occupations, where he found ways to build relationships even in real hardship, befriending a family who made their living selling odds and ends, helping them however he could. He even turned his own intense fear of snakes into an opportunity for connection, hiring local boys each morning to check his boots for any hiding reptiles before he put them on. I was in university during that stretch, and he made a whirlwind trip home for my summer wedding weekend, jet-lagged and grinning, before flying back to finish the job.
I think about Sarajevo and Cambodia, and wonder if I'll go one day. Not to retrace his steps exactly, but because he's the reason those places feel like they belong on my map and not just in a news story.
Even in retirement, his curiosity and spirit of adventure never let up. He hiked the West Coast Trail, volunteered as an election scrutineer in Ukraine's first democratic election, and spent a decade slow-cruising the Gulf Islands aboard a trawler with my mom. Ukraine is on my travel list too, someday, whenever that becomes possible again.
This love of adventure captured my mother as well, and together they were slow travellers long before slow travel was a thing. Their first post-retirement journey perfectly exemplified their unconventional style: living aboard a sailboat cruising from the Bahamas to New Brunswick, navigating the Intracoastal Waterway through Hurricane Eduardo, into a pre-9/11 New York harbour, and past the coast of Maine in dense fog. It was on this trip that they became grandparents for the first time, and I vividly remember calling a marina office in Florida to announce to my parents and the rest of the marina the arrival of their grandson.
A couple of months later, we bundled up our newborn son and flew across Canada to meet them, anchored in my dad's hometown of St. Andrews-by-the-Sea. We lived on the boat for two weeks, putting the baby in a backpack every time we needed to row the dinghy ashore. Non-traditional and extremely memorable.
Their journeys always came with an open invitation. If we, or any of their friends, could make it to wherever they were, we'd be treated like VIPs. On one of their slower adventures, four months on a narrow boat cruising the UK canals, they went without guests for only a couple of weeks. I joined them too, that time with a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, cruising over viaducts, under bridges, through locks, all of us immersed in the slow opportunity to be together.
So here I am today, missing him and embracing my inheritance of wanderlust. He also gave me a compass that always points toward curiosity, toward the unusual option instead of the predetermined path, and I'm deeply grateful for it.
I know I'm not the only one shaped this way. Someone modelled curiosity or inspired a love of adventure for you. Did you have someone in your life who made the unfamiliar feel like something worth chasing instead of something to fear? If they're still around to hear it, I'd remind you what telling my dad felt like. Don't wait for the right moment. This is one of those things worth saying out loud, while you still can.
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