When I was a college student, I left for most of a year in China and Taiwan. My mother was travel jealous, and vowed that she would follow me someday.  Years passed, and complications followed, and she ended up traveling to Hong Kong and Taiwan with my family several years ago.  Sandy Martin, intrepid world explorer, wasn’t content to stop there, however, and when a family relative offered to take her on a month-long trip to the P.R. China, she couldn’t help but follow.

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There are ninety pictures that could accompany this story, but my story is one of admiration and respect for her unrelenting willingness to explore the world.  Before she married my father, she spent months exploring Europe by herself, stories of which I think I still have not heard.  There was a night in a hotel by the Black Forest.  There was a Frenchman who was a little too forward (imagine that).  There was Copenhagen, and the mermaid.   And my dad, who skated through two weeks of sight-seeing before returning to the US.

Dad traveled extensively with mom before he was gone.  But mom’s ambitions are plainly beyond those that Dad could have supported.  As she presses into her seventies, it would seem as if she has the plaintive enthusiasm of a college graduate.  What country she decides to conquer next, what mountain she decides to climb, can only be left to the imagination.  Cheers to Sandy Martin as she contemplates her next exploit.  Like Alexander, she may some day despair that there are no worlds left for her to conquer.

L’chaim!

David