{"id":3202,"date":"2017-05-14T06:55:45","date_gmt":"2017-05-14T11:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/postcardjar.com\/?p=3202"},"modified":"2022-08-17T19:05:39","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T00:05:39","slug":"lessons-i-learned-traveling-with-my-mom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postcardjar.com\/lessons-i-learned-traveling-with-my-mom\/","title":{"rendered":"Traveling with my mom and the lessons I learned"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: This guest post was written by our daughter, Meghan Shrewsbury in 2017. Meghan is now a cardiac ICU nurse in Tulsa, Oklahoma.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

By Meghan Shrewsbury<\/span><\/h2>\n

I think I was born to travel. My first trip traveling with my mom (aside from the one through the birth canal) happened\u00a0when I was only five days old. I flew on a plane\u00a0from South Carolina, where I was born, to Nebraska to meet my grandma. Since then, I haven’t really stopped traveling.<\/p>\n

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My mom had me when she was 24. She was single and working full time as a sports writer for a newspaper in the south and it was just the two of us until she married Steve when I was 16. And while we didn’t necessarily\u00a0have a lot when I was growing up, she always made sure I knew about the world around me. She made it a priority for us to travel, and over the years I learned so many important lessons traveling with my mom.<\/p>\n

I’m 22 now and just so you know, I’m not big on blogging. But as I thought about it, the lessons I’ve learned traveling with my mom have made me the woman I am today, and I just wanted to share those lessons with all of you.<\/p>\n

#1 – Try new things (unless it’s horseback riding)<\/h3>\n

Traveling with my mom, I’ve tried a lot of things for the first time. I rode in the back of a Jeep to the top of a butte at Fort Robinson, ate vegetable curry with my hands in Sri Lanka, and drove a car through a buffalo refuge not long after I had gotten my driving permit. You have to understand, I am not a natural risk-taker and trying new things often took a lot of encouragement and an occasional bribe.<\/p>\n

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Because of\u00a0my mom’s encouraging words<\/del> threatening voice, I have tried a lot of new things I probably never would have done otherwise. I have butchered a chicken and cooked it for dinner, repelled down a cliff (it was actually a small hill, but still), and sang karaoke to Demi Lovato’s Skyscrape<\/em>r one night on a cruise ship in front of complete strangers.<\/p>\n

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Riding a horse, then trying again<\/h2>\n

Looking back, I’m so glad to have had so many new experiences — with one exception. Horseback riding. When I was little, my great grandmother put me on a pony at a\u00a0festival and I was forced to go round and round on an animal I clearly feared. I don’t really remember the experience, likely because I was so traumatized by the whole ordeal and blocked it from my memory. However, I have a Polaroid picture to prove it happened.<\/p>\n

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Somehow, at age 20 I found myself back in the saddle (pun intended) during a study abroad in Spain. I did NOT want to go on this group excursion. But thinking back to all the times my mom encouraged me to try something new, \u00a0I threw myself up onto that horse (literally) and ventured out on a ride from hell.<\/p>\n

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The 2+ hour ride had my adrenaline pumping — but not in a fun or exciting way. That horse took me thrashing about through trees, sand, and even a river. When the ride was finally over, I called my mom and told her she’d be proud of me. “I rode a horse and only cried twice,” I told her. Needless to say,\u00a0if anyone ever asks me to go\u00a0horseback riding again, be assured, it’s a no from me.<\/p>\n

#2 – I learned to pack like a minimalist while traveling with my mom<\/h3>\n

Over the years, I \u00a0think I’ve pretty much\u00a0perfected\u00a0my packing technique. I am now able to efficiently pack for any trip in under half an hour. That wasn’t always the case. It took a lot of traveling with my mom to figure that out.<\/p>\n

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From a young age (especially during my middle school years) I thought I needed to have everything with me at all times. For example, even a walking tour of\u00a0Chicago had to include a large shoulder bag filled with at least twenty items. I brought my bible, a full water bottle, an umbrella, a deck of playing cards, and two pairs of sunglasses. I also brought an electronic Spanish dictionary, and of all things, my retainer in its original case. Needless to say, by the end of the day, my shoulders were bruised and I knew I had made a terrible, terrible decision.<\/p>\n

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After years of ignoring my mom’s suggestions to simplify, today I have finessed my packing list (in a Google doc, of course). I now only take the essentials when I prepare to travel. She was right. Less is more.<\/p>\n

#3- Traveling with my mom taught me to keep things in perspective<\/h3>\n

When I was in 6th grade, my mom and I went to Sri Lanka for a month-long mission trip. My mom had been praying for a group of single mothers there for several years and in the fall of 2004 she\u00a0felt God leading her to go there. A few months after she made a decision to visit this place on the other side of the globe, Sri Lanka was devastated by a tsunami that killed more than 31,000\u00a0people. My mom\u00a0spent the next year\u00a0saving vacation time and doing fundraising for our trip that was set for December 2005.<\/p>\n

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We spent a\u00a0month in tsunami camps helping the survivors of the disaster. We gave medical aid, set up a library in a school, helped hand out bananas at food clinics, and worked with kids who had been homeless\u00a0or abandoned.<\/p>\n

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Upon returning to my middle school back in the states, it really hit me just how blessed we are to live here. I remember having a very difficult time during our lunch break when I watched kids in America dump half of the food on their trays in garbage cans just because they didn’t like the way it tasted. All I could think about were the kids we’d served back in Sri Lanka. I remembered how they begged for another banana or a few grapes and I had to turn them away because we had no more food.<\/p>\n

New perspectives<\/h2>\n

That trip, during some of the most critical years of my life, changed my world view. It gave me perspective. It helped me really appreciate being born in the U.S. with all of the opportunities, freedoms, and resources we have here. That trip helped me understand world hunger, poverty, and disease.<\/p>\n

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My mom and I have also traveled to Japan and Europe together. Each place we’ve been, I’ve learned more and more about the different cultures, religions, foods, and customs of the people who live there. Those experiences continue to give me a better perspective of the world around me. They’ve helped me recognize that often, my “problems” aren’t really problems at all when compared to those in real need. I’ve been fortunate to be able to go on several Christian mission trips on my own to places like Bolivia and the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.<\/p>\n

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Traveling for me isn’t always about seeing a new place or having a great vacation. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy those things. But I also realize I have been incredibly blessed to grow up where I have and that I have the opportunity to bless others by serving them where they are.<\/p>\n

#4 – There truly is no place like Nebraska<\/h3>\n

At my elementary school in Crete, Nebraska, each year fourth graders study Nebraska history. The summer before I started Mrs. Kalkwarf’s class, my mom thought we should go on a trek through\u00a0Nebraska to prepare. Her plan was to take several educational stops along the way. We really had no idea whatsoever where we would go but we just headed west and made it up along the way.<\/p>\n

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We\u00a0took the highway instead of the Interstate making fun stops along the way. Together we visited the Pony Express Museum in Gothenburg, Ole’s Big Game Bar and Grill in Paxton, and we sipped a sarsaparilla in Ogallala at the Front Street Review. Then, we ventured north, and drove through seemingly endless miles of rolling Sandhillls.<\/p>\n

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It was a trip I’ll never forget. We had such a good time exploring our home state, we decided to make our Nebraska road trip an annual event. We’ve done something together in Nebraska almost every year since then.<\/p>\n

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Over the years, we’ve stayed at the Olde Main Street Inn in Chadron<\/a>, and climbed Scottsbluff National Monument. <\/a>Together, we’ve learned about the prehistoric animals at Ashfall Fossil Beds<\/a>, watched the trains at Bailey Yards in North Platte<\/a>, and hiked at Toadstool Geologic Park<\/a>. In all, we’ve made more than a dozen trips around Nebraska and there is still so much more we haven’t seen.<\/p>\n