What is it about travel that seems to demand a souvenir? From the earliest days of “My parents went to Florida and all they bought me was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirts, there seems to be a need to mark one’s success at actually living and breathing in another country, with the purchase of some sort of trinket or doo-dad in order to more fully remember the experience. The pictures in the photo album are never enough, the beaded hair eventually needs to be washed, and the "unforgettable" memories of the mind are hardly reliable over the long term. And so, we need that t-shirt, sculpture, rare faux-crocodile lampshade or simple fridge magnet stuffed precariously in our luggage to reappear somewhere in our rec room announcing to the world that “I have been here. I have travelled. See my stuff. Hear me roar.”
I’m asking these questions because unquestionably I, too, suffer from the need for a travel status marked by the accumulation of unique indigenous material possessions. To start, I am trying to blog my experiences into a sort of permanent online record as a way of perhaps validating and then remembering years later the thoughts and emotions we felt at the time. I love it and, at times, it seems like all I really need to “take away” from this year. But then, I have been as equally obsessive about capturing our year in pictures. In fact, the family has posed so much in front of so many supposedly important landmarks that I think they could all do it blindfolded in the dark. And if the blog and the digital picture library are not enough, I have taken to making a very comprehensive scrapbook for all of our brochures, billets, and bits of flotsam that seems to gather in our wallets and back pockets after every trip. The scrapbook began as an activity with the boys – but, like Michael Phelps caught with bong to lips, I do not deny that I have claimed it as my own.
All of that activity might arguably represent legit examples of logging a once in a lifetime adventure – and yet there are so many, many more examples of souvenir excess; for one, my fridge magnet collection. I did not land on the shores of Australia thinking I needed a new fridge magnet. Let alone a collection. But as we began to frequent more and more gift stores and tourist traps, I began to notice that for no more than five or six bucks, some lucky tourist (or me) could depart with their very own replica picture of the rock, building, or venomous animal that they (or me) just paid good money to see in person. What’s more, as a magnet, that same lucky tourist (me) could go home and plant his purchase on the nearest fridge for all (my family) to see. Needless to say, I have managed to “collect” a few magnets over the past few months with the constant rationalization that they are cheaper than a t-shirt and will last twice as long. If I had in fact purchased a magnet at every possible store that was selling one, we could conceivably have 40-50 such prizes adorning the front of our lucky fridge. As it is, I have shown some admirable restraint with our tally currently coming in at 18…and counting.
I’m asking these questions because unquestionably I, too, suffer from the need for a travel status marked by the accumulation of unique indigenous material possessions. To start, I am trying to blog my experiences into a sort of permanent online record as a way of perhaps validating and then remembering years later the thoughts and emotions we felt at the time. I love it and, at times, it seems like all I really need to “take away” from this year. But then, I have been as equally obsessive about capturing our year in pictures. In fact, the family has posed so much in front of so many supposedly important landmarks that I think they could all do it blindfolded in the dark. And if the blog and the digital picture library are not enough, I have taken to making a very comprehensive scrapbook for all of our brochures, billets, and bits of flotsam that seems to gather in our wallets and back pockets after every trip. The scrapbook began as an activity with the boys – but, like Michael Phelps caught with bong to lips, I do not deny that I have claimed it as my own.
All of that activity might arguably represent legit examples of logging a once in a lifetime adventure – and yet there are so many, many more examples of souvenir excess; for one, my fridge magnet collection. I did not land on the shores of Australia thinking I needed a new fridge magnet. Let alone a collection. But as we began to frequent more and more gift stores and tourist traps, I began to notice that for no more than five or six bucks, some lucky tourist (or me) could depart with their very own replica picture of the rock, building, or venomous animal that they (or me) just paid good money to see in person. What’s more, as a magnet, that same lucky tourist (me) could go home and plant his purchase on the nearest fridge for all (my family) to see. Needless to say, I have managed to “collect” a few magnets over the past few months with the constant rationalization that they are cheaper than a t-shirt and will last twice as long. If I had in fact purchased a magnet at every possible store that was selling one, we could conceivably have 40-50 such prizes adorning the front of our lucky fridge. As it is, I have shown some admirable restraint with our tally currently coming in at 18…and counting.
Another reason for why I think the magnet collection is not bigger, is that I have discovered the next great collector’s item – beer coolers! If there is a fridge magnet at every gift shop, there will undoubtedly be a beer cooler placed right beside it. And while magnets at least retain some sort of dignity in terms of their relative usefulness and ability to convey a sense of place, beer coolers adopt a slightly more bizarre but funky trinket status when they are sold to market something so unrelated to beer. I have seen beer coolers promoting lighthouses, penguins, museums, and everything in between. In fact, we just visited the Old Melbourne Jail the other day, the site of many hangings and the execution of the infamous Ned Kelly, and I decided I needed a Ned Kelly beer cooler. ..A Ned Kelly beer cooler!! I bought it like I was buying a fine piece of art. It was perfect. It made sense. And I knew where I would display it…maybe I needed to start thinking about a display case. The current beer cooler count is three…and counting.
Fortunately, at least for our bank account, Linton does not share my need to mark visits with material gain. Well, unless you count the slow, methodical, and calculated collection of beach wear that seems to appear just before every holiday. The same can’t be said for the boys. Understandably, more for a six and nine year-old than a 42 year-old, the guys are always keen to pick up their own trinket or momento, perhaps as a kind of reward or medal for enduring the hot slog and forced march their parents’ have just subjected them to. In the early days of Australia we had some major blow ups in the back of a few gift shops when the clash between budget, good taste, trunk space and useless plastic toys all mixed together into one huge, ugly domestic dust-up. Usually, the kids won, though the victories and dust ups for that matter have been far less frequent of late. Maybe, just maybe, they’re getting enough joy out of dad’s magnets?
There have been still yet other moments of touristy materialism, though not all in such bad taste as a beer cooler or with such shouting as the incident at the Aquarium. In Alice Springs we splurged on a small original piece of indigenous art. In Byron Bay we bought a black and white photograph for a picture wall back home. We’ve purchased wine in Coonawara and t-shirts at Uluru all in the interest of bringing them and their memories back to Canada. Indeed, the wish list goes on and with no end in sight. Lint is eyeing a fancy purse made by a unique Aussie designer. I’m thinking seriously about a laptop bag from a very trendy bag maker. And Colin is still bugging us about getting a footy Guernsey from his favourite team – Hawthorn. Though we celebrated at the start of this adventure about how much crap we were able to rid from our lives – it would seem some of us are back to crap collecting in a big way!
Well, maybe not crap. But certainly more stuff. And maybe the difference between the crap I hurriedly dropped off at Goodwill last June and the beer coolers I am planning to bring home this July is the fact that there was not one emotional or significant memory tied to the those old toasters and broken toys. Whereas, each of the magnets and every one of the coolers has a moment, an event, or a venomous animal inextricably linked to it. So that when we do buy the odd tea towel or puka bead necklace on vacation we are not so much as adding needlessly to the future garage sale boxes we all have in our basements; rather, we are trying to buy symbols, cheesey as they may be, for those moments in our lives that mattered. And if any of that’s true, at our current rate of momentous moments, the fridge on Harwood should start to get nervous. Now, I just need to find that perfect digeridoo…
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