Member-only story
You can only have an experience by experiencing things
Don’t just GO there; BE there
I read a social media post made by a military spouse who didn’t understand why people stationed in other countries wouldn’t make the effort to explore that country. And I totally get that question. I often wonder about folks who go to exotic locations and spend 100% of their time at the all-inclusive resort except for maybe a couple of resort sponsored guided tours.
There is a whole range of ways to travel that range from visiting a country, through seeing a country and onto experiencing a country.
You go ahead and do YOUR travel style, it doesn’t affect us, but don’t expect us to understand it.
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Our first experience as a couple outside the US as adults was when I was posted to England. My wife took one of her new friends for a shopping adventure off base when we’d been there for about a month. The friend had been there for almost 3 years and had never been to any of the nearby villages. She’d been through and past a few but never stopped to actually see them. They lived in base housing and they shopped at the BX (Base Exchange) and Commissary. If you couldn’t buy it on base, they didn’t have it. Sometimes they would go visit a different base to go shopping. RAF Lakenheath had an electronics store that had a better selection of TV’s and VCR’s and stereo equipment, for example.
