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Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
11,974 posts, read 25,470,414 times
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I've always wanted to travel overseas but I grew up without much money. Mom raised me as a single child on an LPN's income. I had rarely been outside the state of Kentucky before I was a teenager. Even now the only far away places I've been are Ontario / Detroit, Philadelphia, Charleston SC, and Gulf Shores AL. I'll go to Washington DC for the first time in a couple weeks. I do learn a lot about the rest of the world, which has never been easier. While poverty in America is overstated in terms of most people having food, air conditioning, etc it is true that in our car centric society it cost a lot just to be able to drive to a job. Lower middle class Americans really don't have the money for a $1,000 plane ticket to Europe. Even with higher gas prices it's still much cheaper to drive across North America
I have a pretty good job... and only get 2 weeks (10 days ) of vacation per year. After a couple more years I'll get another week. I'll probably wait until I get that extra week to go overseas. Probably prefer an English speaking country for the first trip, probably one of the Celtic countries
I'm 36 years old and on my third passport. Aside from traveling all around the US, I've been to Canada and Mexico several times, all over the Caribbean, London (multiple times), Paris, Greece, UAE, South Africa and Namibia. I have many more places I want to go, including many places off the beaten, European path. Antarctica, anyone?
Anyway, since there always seem to be travelers from all over the world no matter where I go, I have always felt pretty at ease. But when I spent a month in southern Africa this year, I finally felt a bit like a fish out of water. I am used to running into Americans, Aussies, Britons and Germans everywhere; in Namibia we ran into only 3 American families/couples, ONE Aussie family and only a handful of Britons. Nearly every tourist we met was from Germany, as Namibia was formerly a German colony. We had a memorable conversation with the Australian woman over breakfast, who told us that when they told friends at home that they were going to Africa, they were asked things like, "Are you sure it's safe for you to go there?" - similar questions to what we heard. And given the lack of other Europeans, seemingly NO south/central Americans, and no Asians that I recall, I was left with the impression that there are many people in this WORLD that are not as adventurous or curious as we're led to believe. So at least we know Americans aren't so unique in that way!
So why haven't I been to even more places, despite my 30 years with a passport?:
- Lack of money. My first several trips out of the country were family vacations, so not on my dime. I didn't have money to spend on an overseas vacation until I had been out of college for six years. I have student loans to pay, high rent/mortgage, health insurance, retirement, taxes, car payment, etc. Anything I have left over should really be put into liquid savings. My financial situation has improved greatly since my college days, but now I have a family, which makes travel incredibly expensive.
- Lack of vacation time. The most vacation time I ever had through an employer was 4 weeks per year, plus 10 paid holidays, which was after 7 years with them. It was 2 weeks when I started. What was outrageous about that was that we were owned by a FRENCH company and our French colleagues of course had twice as much vacation time as we did. Anyway, even though I had four weeks, my husband has only 3 weeks, and one of those weeks is just an office closure every year from Christmas thru New Year's Day. Which is often spent with family, either them traveling here from Florida or us traveling there. That leaves us with a very American two weeks of vacation per year. We therefore tend to take a couple different kinds of vacations: one small, one-week vacation per year to someplace in the U.S., usually for a purpose (high school reunion, visit to see a friend, add-on to business travel, etc.); and then we'll carry over the rest of the vacation so we can take a 3 or 4 week vacation somewhere overseas a year or two down the line. This enables us to explore a lot more of the countries we travel to; with so many places we want to see, we know we may not make it back to places like Namibia ... so we like to make the most of it when we do travel.
I have no doubt some Americans have no desire to travel, even around the U.S. - I just can't relate to them. All of my friends and colleagues love to travel, and 60% of the students at my university studied overseas (only reason I didn't was because of my major, and I deeply regret it!).
If you are honest most people that travel don't go there. They go to urban areas and go to the beach, eat at restaurants, and do crap they could do in their own countries.
I literally don't know one person here that has not left the country and we're talking about one of the most isolated countries in Europe, here.
I think they meant Europeans that have literally crossed an ocean. It is easy for a French man to visit Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands because they are not across a sea. Most Americans I know growing up went to the Caribbean for vacation due to the convenience. But not Europe or Asia.
By law, a German gets a minimum of 20 vacation days a year plus nine paid public holidays.
An American gets no such guarantee. The common amount of vacation days for an average American is ten. Add New Years, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the average German gets almost twice the amount of vacation.
Further, by the time you take a day off to travel to a family wedding, a three-day weekend, whatever, you typically get one week of real vacation a year. You really have to marshall your time carefully.
So with your whopping week of real vacation time, hopping on a long flight to Europe or Asia holds little appeal. Heck, it takes a couple of days to just recover from the jet lag. After my trek home from New Zealand, I didn't sleep right for a week.
The other thing? The United States is so big, so diverse, that you can enjoy a wealth of attraction without ever actually needing a passport. From the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean to Hawaii and the Pacific Isles, from New York, San Francisco, Boston, Alaska, Yellowstone, LA, and a host of other attractions, you can literally travel a huge number of places in the United States without the actual hassle of crossing a border.
In Europe, you can travel 200 miles in one direction and everybody's speaking French. Or Dutch. Or Italian, Czech, Polish, Danish, etc. etc. Travel 500 in some parts of the United States and the accents scarcely change.
I mean, when you realize that it's actually considered an accomplishment for an American to visit all fifty states, that should give you a frame of reference. The average American visits eight states in his or her lifetime. I'm 54, have traveled a good bit on business, but I've only visited 36.
I've traveled overseas a good bit more than most. But the sheer difficulty of arranging the time off, along with the logistics of squeezing in a trip into one week of vacation, put it out of reach for most Americans. It's not a lack of desire. It's a lack of time.
-As other posters mentioned the work culture in the U.S. is much different than in most of Europe.
-The cost of traveling to Europe and many places overseas is not cheap.
-A lot of people who can afford it do travel. Personally I've been to the Netherlands and U.K. and have many friends who either vactioned or studied abroad.
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