This summer's family vacation to southeast Asia was harder travel than prior trips.
The heat, the humidity, and the monsoon rains that ranged from refreshing to torrential street floods were substantial. (A sample weather app reading during the trip: 97 degrees F, feels like 107).
The 26 hour travel time to arrive, combined with the bureaucratic hassles of obtaining permission to enter communist countries, made for greater physiologic strain.
There was also a psychological toll: these were countries less developed than any my kids had visited previously, and it was the first time they occasionally found themselves the only people who looked like them in a large crowd.
In short, although our accommodations were plenty comfortable, this was more of a dirtbag family trip than we had ever taken.
I'm grateful we got to experience the intersection of cultures, snorkel pristine waters, take cooking lessons in cuisines we have long enjoyed at local restaurants, and spend time together making memories.
We saw sights that seemed lifted straight out of the Indiana Jones movies that sculpted my concept of ancient civilizations in childhood - only these were the inspirations for those films!
We saw banana spiders the diameter of my hand, and mating millipedes that were 6 inches in length. We happened across a pair of octopuses that were mating. I sustained a sting from a box jellyfish that, 6 weeks later, seems destined to leave both a memory and a scar.
We enjoyed massages in multiple nations. We collectively submerged our feet into tanks of small, toothless carnivorous fish that remove dead skin as part of the weirdest spa treatment ever.
We visited night markets in three countries, and commented on the slogan t-shirts they all seemed to have in common. We admired artists who worked with found objects, and chefs who channeled local ingredients and traditions into contemporary novelties.
One highlight was a humble vegetarian food court run by Buddhist monastery that resembled a high school cafeteria. We made friends with curious locals who spoke English and encouraged to try dishes we might otherwise never experience - by consensus it was one of the best meals of our trip.
We tasted exotic tropical fruits like mangosteen, durian and snakefruit. We had bowls of fruit, yogurt and grains (backpacker's delight) for breakfast at our airbnb and it never got old. We planned our days around sampling iced coffees that were among the best we've ever experienced.
We visited temples ranging from hundreds to thousands of years old. We saw the collision and unique intersections of Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu traditions and cultures.
It was a bittersweet trip - now that our oldest is off to college soon, we can't depend on being able to travel so extensively together as a family in future summers because we will not know if her summer plans take her on different paths.
It also made me realize a few things. First, it reinforced that the destinations have grown far less important than the shared memories and time spent together. Second, I may need to be more selective about hard travel - it consumes goodwill that I will need to work to replenish. Third, travel is getting harder (and adapting after jet lag more difficult) than when I was a spring chicken. I need to factor that into any future retirement plans.